6 ms·

> 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 i

> 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.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    I guess. I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much. I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree. Of course, different people have different preferences.
    - ryandrake 5mo ago
      Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.
      - ghaff 5mo ago
        Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.
- throw0101c 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. Commute time has been 30 minutes for a large portion of human history: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    I don't really disagree. One hour each way starts to seem like a lot. 30 minutes isn't walking next door or downstairs but seems pretty doable in general. Even within a large city with decent public transit, it's not hard to get up to close to a half-hour commute to get into an office. Most people who don't work from home don't live a 5 minute walk from their workplace.
  - antiframe 5mo ago
    A 30 minute commute by foot, where one passes interesting architecture, parks, is under the shade of trees, can pop into the corner store to get extra milk on the way home (2 minute detour), etc is far more pleasant than a 30 minute commute by car, surrounded by other cars on a seven lane highway with billboards. Quality matters just as much as quantity, and often more when they're close together. (I would of course prefer a 10 minute drive to a 90 minute walk, for example).
    - throw0101c 5mo ago
      Tell that to the folks that have built most of America in the post-WW2 era.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  Historically people had to work on a farm! The vast majority of the historical population lived close enough to their fields to walk to it every day. Sure Rome had a million people 2000 years ago, but that was only possible because many many millions of people (often slaves and thus not seen much in history) who didn't live in Rome and produced a surplus of food.
  - enaaem 5mo ago
    Farms were always placed as close to the city as much as possible, because it is impractical to transport food from a distance. An ox-drawn cart isn't faster than walking speed, so farmers still had to live a walkable distance from the city market. Historic cities and castles are almost always wrongly depicted in movies. They are always placed in a grace field in the middle of nowhere, but there should be farmland everywhere.
Andrex 5mo ago
In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."
- dummydummy1234 5mo ago
  Population is generally stable or declining out side of the developing world. Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.
  - MostlyStable 5mo ago
    It's declining nearly everywhere except for some portions of Africa (where the trend is also towards lower fertility. I'm not aware of anywhere that is both "stable" (~2.1) and has a flat trend; that is to say that it isn't just momentarily passing through stability on it's way to declining population.
- mapt 5mo ago
  In what extremes? "Extrapolate this forward through five hundred years of exponential population growth that is not in evidence"?
- bluGill 5mo ago
  That cannot happen. Cities need a lot of "empty" space around them for farms. Well I suppose everyone could move to Spain (picking a random country) and leave the rest of the world to robotic farms. However we can't expand to cover even all of Spain unless everyone is living in a mega suburb with everyone having their own single story mansion. (others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)
- lopis 5mo ago
  This take makes no sense, if you take into account that 100 families could live in the space of one single detached home. High density building isn't suddenly going to take over suburbs like that.
throw0101c 5mo ago
> 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. The existing "city" was the suburb of the past: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing * https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middle/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middl...
bluGill 5mo ago
In the US the city is not a safe place for kids. Great for the 21-30 year old crowd (and older folks that didn't "grow up") since there are many great bars and parties, but there are no kid friendly places. I know several people out here in the suburbs who loved city living until they had kids. One kid under 5 isn't too bad, but as soon as the kid is school age you look at how bad the schools are and you get out thus ensuring nobody will try to fix the problem.
- jghn 5mo ago
  A large problem in discourse like this is relative terms. Specifically what people consider to be "city" or "urban" vs "suburban" vs "rural". I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    And part of the problem in the US is that the US census has a very binary definition: urban and rural. Myself and two neighbors live on about 100 acres (not counting adjacent conservation land). We're considered urban. because we're about an hour drive of a fairly large city. But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.
- dgacmu 5mo ago
  That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids. (Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.
- 5mo ago
api 5mo ago
I like to put it this way: The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets. I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there. I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about. Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.
- throw0101c 5mo ago
  > I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." […] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate. Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
    - bombcar 5mo ago
trgn 5mo ago
i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere. i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to. the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ... it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target. i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.
- buellerbueller 5mo ago
  i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs. i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
  - sarchertech 5mo ago
    There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s. But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse. Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s. So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
    - 5mo ago
eloisant 5mo ago
The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars. You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.
- nicoburns 5mo ago
  Isn't the issue that there are zoning laws preventing the conversion of the suburbs into more city?
- petsfed 5mo ago
  I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations. You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.
    - petsfed 5mo ago
crooked-v 5mo ago
> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.

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.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  I guess. I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much. I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree. Of course, different people have different preferences.
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.
    - ghaff 5mo ago
      Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.
throw0101c 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. Commute time has been 30 minutes for a large portion of human history: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  I don't really disagree. One hour each way starts to seem like a lot. 30 minutes isn't walking next door or downstairs but seems pretty doable in general. Even within a large city with decent public transit, it's not hard to get up to close to a half-hour commute to get into an office. Most people who don't work from home don't live a 5 minute walk from their workplace.
- antiframe 5mo ago
  A 30 minute commute by foot, where one passes interesting architecture, parks, is under the shade of trees, can pop into the corner store to get extra milk on the way home (2 minute detour), etc is far more pleasant than a 30 minute commute by car, surrounded by other cars on a seven lane highway with billboards. Quality matters just as much as quantity, and often more when they're close together. (I would of course prefer a 10 minute drive to a 90 minute walk, for example).
  - throw0101c 5mo ago
    Tell that to the folks that have built most of America in the post-WW2 era.
bluGill 5mo ago
Historically people had to work on a farm! The vast majority of the historical population lived close enough to their fields to walk to it every day. Sure Rome had a million people 2000 years ago, but that was only possible because many many millions of people (often slaves and thus not seen much in history) who didn't live in Rome and produced a surplus of food.
- enaaem 5mo ago
  Farms were always placed as close to the city as much as possible, because it is impractical to transport food from a distance. An ox-drawn cart isn't faster than walking speed, so farmers still had to live a walkable distance from the city market. Historic cities and castles are almost always wrongly depicted in movies. They are always placed in a grace field in the middle of nowhere, but there should be farmland everywhere.

Andrex 5mo ago

In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."

dummydummy1234 5mo ago
Population is generally stable or declining out side of the developing world. Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.
- MostlyStable 5mo ago
  It's declining nearly everywhere except for some portions of Africa (where the trend is also towards lower fertility. I'm not aware of anywhere that is both "stable" (~2.1) and has a flat trend; that is to say that it isn't just momentarily passing through stability on it's way to declining population.
mapt 5mo ago
In what extremes? "Extrapolate this forward through five hundred years of exponential population growth that is not in evidence"?
bluGill 5mo ago
That cannot happen. Cities need a lot of "empty" space around them for farms. Well I suppose everyone could move to Spain (picking a random country) and leave the rest of the world to robotic farms. However we can't expand to cover even all of Spain unless everyone is living in a mega suburb with everyone having their own single story mansion. (others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)
lopis 5mo ago
This take makes no sense, if you take into account that 100 families could live in the space of one single detached home. High density building isn't suddenly going to take over suburbs like that.

throw0101c 5mo ago

> 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. The existing "city" was the suburb of the past: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing * https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middle/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middl...

bluGill 5mo ago

In the US the city is not a safe place for kids. Great for the 21-30 year old crowd (and older folks that didn't "grow up") since there are many great bars and parties, but there are no kid friendly places. I know several people out here in the suburbs who loved city living until they had kids. One kid under 5 isn't too bad, but as soon as the kid is school age you look at how bad the schools are and you get out thus ensuring nobody will try to fix the problem.

jghn 5mo ago
A large problem in discourse like this is relative terms. Specifically what people consider to be "city" or "urban" vs "suburban" vs "rural". I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.
- ghaff 5mo ago
  And part of the problem in the US is that the US census has a very binary definition: urban and rural. Myself and two neighbors live on about 100 acres (not counting adjacent conservation land). We're considered urban. because we're about an hour drive of a fairly large city. But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.
dgacmu 5mo ago
That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids. (Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.
5mo ago

api 5mo ago

I like to put it this way: The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets. I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there. I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about. Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.

throw0101c 5mo ago
> I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." […] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate. Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
  - bombcar 5mo ago

trgn 5mo ago

i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere. i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to. the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ... it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target. i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.

buellerbueller 5mo ago
i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs. i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
- sarchertech 5mo ago
  There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s. But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse. Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s. So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
  - 5mo ago

eloisant 5mo ago

The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars. You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.

nicoburns 5mo ago
Isn't the issue that there are zoning laws preventing the conversion of the suburbs into more city?
petsfed 5mo ago
I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations. You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.
  - petsfed 5mo ago

crooked-v 5mo ago

> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.