5 ms·

To me, the planning and density issues everyone's taking about feel like a red herring. Plunk this woman down in the middle of NYC and remove her need for a car

To me, the planning and density issues everyone's taking about feel like a red herring. Plunk this woman down in the middle of NYC and remove her need for a car whatsoever. Is she really going to let her kid go wherever he wants outside? Is she really going to feel a sense of community, or will she be like most New Yorkers and barely know who her neighbors are? (And before you say 'that's because NYC isn't planned well, either,' would these problems truly go away with more parks?) I'm just theorizing, of course, but I suspect her real issues have a lot more to do with cultural homogeneity and societal mobility. A community with people from all over the place, constantly moving in and out? Low trust and lots of alienation. My whitebread little Texas town, where every church is full on Sunday and the average person's been here for decades? We're completely car dependent out here, the streets are real wide, and for that matter, there's no sidewalks and barely any parks - but there's unsupervised kids running around all over the place, and I can't get through a supermarket trip without being stopped for a conversation with someone I've met. It's nice, and as far as I can tell, it's all without the benefits of urban planning.

robdoherty2 14y ago
There are quite a few neighborhoods in NY that have a great sense of community, albeit mostly in the boroughs
roc 14y ago
There used to be these things called small towns. [1] One wasn't forced to choose between "20 minutes from anything" and "New York City". Most people talking about the density issue are lamenting the lack of these middle choices. The places where a family would probably still need a car, but it would be conceivable to have a functional bus system to get you from one small town to the next, or into the city. Where you can still own a house with a yard, but walking to corner store wasn't a circuitous two mile hike with intermittent sidewalks. etc. [1] Before they were largely converted to glorified open-air-malls for the cul-de-sac dwellers to drive to on the weekends.
- smackfu 14y ago
  I do wonder how many of these utopian small towns ever really existed, and when (1920-1950 or so?).
  - roc 14y ago
    Count up the glorified open air malls in your area and do a little local history. This can be casually done by noting average home build dates in various neighborhoods. Find a neighborhood with houses from the 40s/50s and note the layout. Then find a neighborhood built in the 70s and note the layout. You can do that with any number of real-estate tools and/or Google Maps. Just in the county I grew up in there was at least a dozen of those small towns -- each with shops, mainstreets, mixed-use zoning, surrounding homes, often with train stations and/or bus depots (some surviving to this day), all very walkable and livable. Then the farmland around them was cut up into suburbs in the 40s and 50s. But even those were notably different from modern suburbs: walkable, smaller lots, still some mixed use with corner stores and restaurants. The cul-de-sac and single-use zoning atrocities didn't start showing up until the 70s, when they basically stitched the old towns and old neighborhoods together into one largely-unbroken stream of Modern Americana. And again, the thrust isn't that we should all have small towns or that suburbs are wrong for everyone. It's that the old spectrum has been reduced to a binary. You have suburbs and you have New York City. The fact that 'US city' discussions always revert to talking about a handful of the oldest cities is itself a tell: if it didn't grow into a city before suburbanization, they didn't really grow into a city. Many look for all the world like a high-rise downtown bolted onto suburban sprawl like an upscale version of a big box strip mall. They don't really "count" as a city like New York or Chicago and we all know it.
    - colomon 14y ago
      Don't know where you live, but we still have boatloads of small towns here in Michigan. Farms and rural townships too. As far as I can tell from my travels, the same goes for the state of New York, too. (And Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana...)
      - 14y ago
tthomas48 14y ago
I think this is the heart of the matter. Why are people disengaging? I have the same experience as you in central Austin which, while not NYC, is still one the biggest cities in the US. I encounter people I know everywhere I go. The grocery store, theater, bar, etc. But I'm engaged in my community. I think there's something else at play here. I suspect many people aren't interested in engagement and are seeking out ways to retreat. Clearly in your rural Texas town someone could still buy a house miles away from anyone and not engage at all. I wonder if people aren't doing so, or if they do so in such small numbers that you don't really notice.
- March_Hare 14y ago
  There is an order of magnitude between the population of Austin and NYC. Perhaps comparing Austin with a similar sized city, Columbus for example, would be a better comparison.
  - tthomas48 14y ago
    I was comparing to a small Texas town.

robdoherty2 14y ago

There are quite a few neighborhoods in NY that have a great sense of community, albeit mostly in the boroughs

roc 14y ago

There used to be these things called small towns. [1] One wasn't forced to choose between "20 minutes from anything" and "New York City". Most people talking about the density issue are lamenting the lack of these middle choices. The places where a family would probably still need a car, but it would be conceivable to have a functional bus system to get you from one small town to the next, or into the city. Where you can still own a house with a yard, but walking to corner store wasn't a circuitous two mile hike with intermittent sidewalks. etc. [1] Before they were largely converted to glorified open-air-malls for the cul-de-sac dwellers to drive to on the weekends.

smackfu 14y ago
I do wonder how many of these utopian small towns ever really existed, and when (1920-1950 or so?).
- roc 14y ago
  Count up the glorified open air malls in your area and do a little local history. This can be casually done by noting average home build dates in various neighborhoods. Find a neighborhood with houses from the 40s/50s and note the layout. Then find a neighborhood built in the 70s and note the layout. You can do that with any number of real-estate tools and/or Google Maps. Just in the county I grew up in there was at least a dozen of those small towns -- each with shops, mainstreets, mixed-use zoning, surrounding homes, often with train stations and/or bus depots (some surviving to this day), all very walkable and livable. Then the farmland around them was cut up into suburbs in the 40s and 50s. But even those were notably different from modern suburbs: walkable, smaller lots, still some mixed use with corner stores and restaurants. The cul-de-sac and single-use zoning atrocities didn't start showing up until the 70s, when they basically stitched the old towns and old neighborhoods together into one largely-unbroken stream of Modern Americana. And again, the thrust isn't that we should all have small towns or that suburbs are wrong for everyone. It's that the old spectrum has been reduced to a binary. You have suburbs and you have New York City. The fact that 'US city' discussions always revert to talking about a handful of the oldest cities is itself a tell: if it didn't grow into a city before suburbanization, they didn't really grow into a city. Many look for all the world like a high-rise downtown bolted onto suburban sprawl like an upscale version of a big box strip mall. They don't really "count" as a city like New York or Chicago and we all know it.
  - colomon 14y ago
    Don't know where you live, but we still have boatloads of small towns here in Michigan. Farms and rural townships too. As far as I can tell from my travels, the same goes for the state of New York, too. (And Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana...)
    - 14y ago

tthomas48 14y ago

I think this is the heart of the matter. Why are people disengaging? I have the same experience as you in central Austin which, while not NYC, is still one the biggest cities in the US. I encounter people I know everywhere I go. The grocery store, theater, bar, etc. But I'm engaged in my community. I think there's something else at play here. I suspect many people aren't interested in engagement and are seeking out ways to retreat. Clearly in your rural Texas town someone could still buy a house miles away from anyone and not engage at all. I wonder if people aren't doing so, or if they do so in such small numbers that you don't really notice.

March_Hare 14y ago
There is an order of magnitude between the population of Austin and NYC. Perhaps comparing Austin with a similar sized city, Columbus for example, would be a better comparison.
- tthomas48 14y ago
  I was comparing to a small Texas town.