Is the pandemic, or is it the fact that exclusionary zoning has dramatically raised the cost of housing in many cities: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne..., and those costs are only worth bearing if the cultural and social amenities are also available? Without liberalizing urban zoning, it's hard to say.
Preferences are almost certainly a factor. I live in Houston, where we don't have zoning, yet it's specifically cited (and I can confirm) that the vast majority of residents live in suburbs. The article itself acknowledges that, "Americans have been running away from dense, vertical design for a century." People don't want to live in small spaces with close neighbors, or at least, I don't. I don't see the appeal of going to a restaurant on foot given that I never (or very seldom) eat out. Same thing for coffee. I don't shop except for occasional online purchases, and never "go shopping" as many are wont to do. Just about the only things I do are go to the office (which was at least partially virtual, even before corona) and occasionally drive to a business function or symphony performance. Living in an urban area simply holds no appeal for me, or at least, I don't see any appeal. While I can't be sure as to everyone's reasons, it appears others may feel similarly.
As an aside, the article refers to "the suburban wine room." I have yet to see someone with a "wine room"; is this commonplace? A regional difference, perhaps? It also refers to "his-and-hers walk-in closets"; I don't know any guy with his own walk-in closet excepting those that live in apartments that came with one.
Speaking from a wealthy Chicago suburb here, wine rooms are decently common assuming they are talking about a room dedicated to storing wine (usually underneath your basement staircase). My parents also have separate walk in closets.
> I live in Houston, where we don't have zoning, yet it's specifically cited (and I can confirm) that the vast majority of residents live in suburbs.
Houston doesn't have explicit zoning, which is true, but this doesn't mean that it's necessarily any easier to build dense housing if that's what the market demands.
- Deed restrictions effectively work as zoning by limiting what a given parcel can't be developed into, and they are city enforced; this restricts dense development, particularly in wealthy, high-amenity, high-convenience neighborhoods that might otherwise be more densely developed by natural forces.
- While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes. Mandated parking will drive up the cost of dense development because the minimums are set very high, and it means you either have to give over valuable floor space for parking, you have to build very expensive underground or structured parking, or a combination of the two. By indirectly driving up the cost of dense development, minimum parking regulations makes less of it pencil out.
If dense living was not in demand and undersupplied (which I believe it is), dense apartments would not fetch more per sq ft than a house in a low density suburb, at least not successfully.
>While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes.
This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any similarly sized US city.
If your apartment building will not be attractive without two dedicated parking spots per bedroom, the government doesn’t have to say a thing: A builder will not want to make an unprofitable building with insufficient parking.
The trick here is that many of the rules are designed for maximum possible need, leading to a sea of lots that are never actually full. It’s silly to build all strip mallS with parking lots that will be comfortable in Black Friday if every store has a major holiday sales bias.
Building too much parking also has painful externalities, as walking, even from store to store, becomes problematic, and maintenance for those oversized lots is not free. It’s just that those externalities are legislated in as the status quo, so they are invisible unless you look somewhere else.
That is also the cause of the lack of good public transportation. You can't have good public transportation when there is so much space dedicated to parking
It's pretty hard to do good public transportation in a place like Houston. I've had forty-mile commutes in the past, and once you get that far out, you get that nasty superlinear expansion of area covered. The closest Houston could ever get is park-and-ride, i.e. re-locating the sea of asphalt, because buses are too dang slow. Not to mention walking is absolute misery due to weather from May to September.
What the parent comment is saying doesn't disagree with this statement, but rather that this is self-inflicted by the chicken-and-egg nature of "we need more parking". The requirement for parking is what causes Houston to consider 40+ mile commutes normal, because the need for parking physically pushes uses further away from each other, making transit and walking less attractive, driving people into cars, and thus requiring ever more parking.
Forget about the distant places, Houston has a few dense places where transit can get decent ridership. Get rid of parking minimums and developers can turn some parking lots into a building increasing density and in turn making transit work better. Focus where you can win, let the rest be. Even if the city grows faster than the transport network, transit is still winning. Slow and steady can win this race of the time span of decades.
> Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity,
Turning that around: a lack of public transport options creates painful externalities on new construction (mandatory large parking lots) and the city (must put in multiplane roads for every new block).
I'm from the UK, and have been to Houston several times for work. I can't think of Houston as a "city" - it has a small "downtown" area with some high-rise buildings, and a huge sprawl of strip malls, clusters of houses and disconnected gaited communities. As a European, it's very odd.
Developers are not dumb, they can figure out what kind of parking is needed for their building without the power of law.
> It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more you prioritize car use with requirements for large garages, large surface lots, and large, wide, high speed roads, the more you make transit and walking slower and less effective, and the more you drive people into cars.
Houston has very high parking requirements that are actually even higher than what you are describing; even for "micro-apartments", an apartment size characterized by ~2-300 sq ft total space that could probably only fit one person comfortably, the Houston code requires more than one parking space per unit. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/Req...
One market-based hint that the parking requirements are too high in most cities is that developers nearly always only build the minimum; if more was required you'd expect more people to go and above minimum requirements.
I don’t live in the US, but I’m in the same boat. I vastly prefer my suburb to the central city. I have great neighbours, who I only have to see when I want to. I have everything I could need or want.
What am I missing out on by not being in the city centre? Shows? I don’t go to them. Restaurants? I have a dog with separation anxiety and a 4mo daughter - I’m not going to any restaurants. Street festivals? Spare me. Art and modern “culture”? Thanks, but no thanks.
I’m perfectly happy for other people to pack themselves into noisy, cramped apartments if they like, I just don’t understand why the HN crowd seems to automatically assume that’s what I should want.
I think a lot of it comes down to how you feel about cars/driving. driving in a dense city is an awful experience, but you can probably walk or take public transit to most of the places you need to be in a given week. driving in a rural area can be lovely, and you're gonna have to do it to get anywhere. driving in a suburb is not as bad as driving in the city, but imo it's still a pretty unenjoyable experience, and you need to do it to get most places. I personally love driving, but I'd rather not drive at all than have a bad driving experience.
I live in a city and (in normal times) work in a suburb ~20 miles away. my commute is pretty painless; it's just a straight shot down the interstate in the opposite direction of most other people. but once I get there, it's amazing how unpleasant it is to drive around in a place that was built from the ground up to accommodate cars. even the shortest trips involve driving to a highway, traveling on it for one or two exits, then getting off and driving to your destination. I have no idea how people get around on bikes there. there are several shopping centers that are only connected by a limited access highway. I often joke that in that suburb, no trip takes more than fifteen minutes by car, but none are shorter either.
Typically wine rooms and walk-in closets (of any type) are found in the much newer and very expensive (or moderately expensive, but very far away) suburban neighborhoods.
I live on the outskirts of a midwestern city and only know a couple people who live in such homes.
Though I'm not from a wealthy background, so most of my family and friends (even in the suburbs) are in 1000-2000 sq ft houses where sometimes a 2nd bathroom is a nice amenity.
But we do have (usually unfinished) basements here which add at least a few hundred square feet of utility space to a house. I couldn't imagine life without one!
I don't know which I prefer. I think I'd prefer to be filthy rich and have a house or penthouse in the city haha.
But, I grew up in the suburbs and now live in the city. I love both. I love that there are interesting places to walk to, coffee shops, bakeries, bars, restaurants, book stores, etc... but I miss the freedoms of my suburban childhood like a yard to play in, a garage for power tools and bikes, being able to be loud indoors at all hours, being able to have house parties or even just entertain 2-4 friends at any time of the day or night without annoying the neighbors, block parties, and even just knowing my neighbors well. Yes, I suppose I could do that in an apartment building but maybe because we live so close we don't want to know each other :P
I live in a small semi-detached house that's walkable to the downtown of our city. I can bike to dozens different places to get take-out, we have a small private back garden where we can host guests, and we have enough space for two of us to work from home in privacy. We also actually see our neighbors outside every evening when we walk around.
There's definitely an in-between, medium density option that this article seems to ignore in favor of focusing on car-focused, isolated suburbs where everyone had 5 bedrooms and a pool.
That’s exactly what I want except where I am the schools are all awful for any area with houses like that. So either move to car-centric suburbs or add another $20k+ per year to send two kids to decent private schools.
I obviously can’t speak for the country as a whole, but at least in Milwaukee the schools in those areas are often fine to great, it’s the “school report cards” that are terrible.
The number one predictor of a school’s rating is the average income of its parents. Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school. City schools have poor kids and lower average test scores, but I don’t know anyone who chose the city schools by me and has regretted it.
> Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school.
This is somewhat true but it's missing a component I didn't realize was as important - you're getting relationships/networking even at these "good" schools. I know that sounds stupid but being around people of high socioeconomic status helps you learn unspoken signals and norms. On top of that - your peers will likely be going into high paying professions and will be able to help you make your way into that profession as well. Some people I know who went to these rich kid schools are happy that they did because it helped them. I rarely meet people who were like, "Yeah, going to that rich kid school was pointless. It had literally no effect on my life." I used to think I could just parent/teach my way out of any shit school and then I've watched my friends have kids. There's too much social stuff that can't be made up for by parents.
I'd be especially wary of putting a kid in a poor school. If you go to a poor school (rated or, especially, funded) then you will have to put in a lot more effort as a parent to get satisfactory results - and likely your kid will lose all childhood friendships as they age. People in poor schools frequently don't break out. If you're putting in the effort or your child is just generally exceptional then they'll break out... Which means they're leaving everyone behind and forging a path that none of their peers have done. It makes for an isolated experience and a really difficult one. If you've done it - great, you can help your kid but is that enjoyable? The programs for children who would be average or above average at a good school frequently don't exist at poor schools. Think AP courses, college credit, computer classes, advanced math and english, foreign language options, etc. I know because I had to go to a school that could only afford 4 days a week and that had to cut almost every elective. I've stayed in contact with no one from that region because... well, there's not much of a point. I haven't spoken to anyone from that school in close to 10 or so years and I'm not even 30.
That said - if you or your kid has no large ambitions or only ones that /somehow/ don't rely on any social components at all then it doesn't matter.
People find Brave New World's Betas and Gammas[1] to be evidence of dystopia, but my observation of the US school system is that by moving[2] to a specific ZIP+4, one attempts to influence one's viviparous children's lot in life by picking their friends' parents.
On the russian side, I'll make the preposterous claim that Crimea had to be "liberated", because otherwise how else were non-Moscow parents supposed to be able to send their kids to Artek[3] for the summer?
I wonder what would happen if well-off folks worked at improving public schools rather than fleeing to private institutions.
Granted, I live in the midwest where public schools are, as a general rule, pretty good. One of the reasons we moved to the town we did though is that they have a unified school system. I heard too many of my more well-off acquaintances making offhand comments amounting to "oh, you don't want to move there. They go to the poor people school."
If you think good schools are a public good, put your family where your mouth is.
Private schooling in inherently exclusive. This is the prime motivator. It ensures their children will only have peers of a similar socioeconomic background.
Unfortunately there is no incentive to wait. I would expect most people would like public schools to be better but have no expectation they can influence them to be better in time for their kids to benefit so they'd separate the two issues. (1) send your kids to private school so you're not sacrificing them on principle (2) push for better public schools.
I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money. IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty and all the problems that come with it.
> I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money.
IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.
Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).
Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that would be acceptable.
In my area (urban, educated south) we moved from a the "busing model" for integration, into a "magnet school" model. If a school is failing, reboot it as a "charter-like" school, with some attractive theme. It is still a public school, but now offers something unique the community (like robotics programs or mandarin immersion, arts programs in partners with the opera or state symphony, IB schools etc). Then it "attracts" interested parents across the district and becomes self-sustaining. The local population gets access to the improved school, and others have a lottery (or by other means with special rules for siblings and more).
It isn't perfect, but it seems like attracting interest via magnet programs works a lot better than throwing more money at failing schools or unequal access to charter schools.
The reality as we have experienced it is that most public schools are just fine and if families simply sent their children there, the schools and community would benefit from the participation
You need to define what unified means, without that your comments are unclear. In many big cities there is one school district, but the school you go to is basically defined by the area you live in, you go to a school near your house.
Thus you end up with segregated schools if you have segregation by race or income (ie rich people live in expensive housing that is grouped, and that school has better educated parents and they can give more support to it). You need to add integrated to that equation. I went to a school that was historically racist with clear separation in schools that reflected neighborhood separation. At some point there was court ordered integration - and that was a really good thing. Over time, after I left the area, richer and whiter people either moved out of the city to the county schools and/or sent their kids to private schools, so the old segregation was re-introduced.
Yea I realized after posting that the wording is probably not quite correct. What I meant is there is a single school that serves the entire district. Technically, there are several buildings, but they are broken up by grade elementary / middle / high schools.
Private schools are a bane to society.
They mainly provide the well endowed separation from the less endowed, forming they're own clique which eventually creates a class system.
Not to mention that they deplete the public system from talent, exasperating the class issues.
I have some experience with both sides of this picture. I grew up in a suburb with highly rated schools, and I'm raising my kid in a dense city with poorly rated schools. School ratings are (mostly) complete bullshit. My school left me completely unprepared for facing the real world. I literally had history teachers that taught me that the civil war wasn't about slavery. Every teacher I had taught to the test, and this was decades before NCLB.
Meanwhile, my child who is in a medium rated school in a poorly rated school district is learning critical thinking skills that I didn't even know were necessary until I started flunking out of college. As a second grader, he not only can keep up with math and science and writing standards for his age group, but he can actually apply it: I'm constantly seeing him take real world problems and figure out how to use something he learned in school to solve that problem, whether by building a mental mathematical model or designing an experiment, or using a resource like a dictionary to help him understand a word he doesn't know. My world was never like that...I thought of school as an intake of knowledge that had to be memorized, not as a way of learning.
I'm not putting these motivations into your mouth, but I get the feeling like school ratings are merely a subconscious correlation with whiteness, and as long as you aren't completely checked out from your child's life, you can ignore them completely.
I agree that having a house downtown is a nice way to live. And there are plenty of great cities in the US where houses close to downtown are affordable to the middle class. But a small, semi-detached house doesn't sound like medium density to me. That's only an option in a city where not everyone wants to live downtown (areas where people prefer the suburbs), or if you have enough money to outbid everyone else who wants that house.
You don't have to have houses stacked on top of each other to achieve density. There are plenty of turn of the century streetcar suburbs in the US that are chock full of detached single family homes but still have densities in the 10k/sqmi territory. It's only when you throw in minimum lot sizes, setbacks, wide streets, and minimum parking requirements that you take those single family homes and turn them into sprawl.
There are a lot of small cities that are like this - Ann Arbor, New Haven, Providence, etc. Though the downside is that career opportunities are correspondingly more limited.
Every East Asian polity with 50-story soulless concrete apartment buildings is in the middle of successfully beating it back, so really American cities are _not dense enough_
Yes, it sure is confusing why say NYC had a times 5000-6000 new cases a day and yet Tokyo, a city with 2-3x more people and way more crowded trains and offices and stores never had more than 200 a day.
People come up with all kinds of theories but none of them seem to fit. One theory, Japanese wear masks. They didn't until the lockdown which was late. They've mostly unlocked now and restaurants seem relatively busy. Of course (almost) everyone is still wearing a mask and lots of precautions are in place but at a glance seeing the still crowded trains and now crowded restaurants it's hard to figure out why the numbers stay so low.
Some people claim not enough testing but if that's all it was there would still be a death rate climb and arguably an ICU overflow and that hasn't happened either.
The fraction of positives has also been very low in Japan. Considering they have largely stuck with their restrictions on test access, this means people with fever and such symptoms are still mostly due to other reasons, despite being deep in summer now when such things are uncommon.
I have been puzzling over the Japan situation from the beginning. They go against a lot of narrative about why the US got so bad. People would wave them off with conspiracy theories about the Olympics. We definitely need some much better survey data.
They are a healthier (%3 obese vs %30 obese), quieter, less touchy (ex: bow vs handshake, no hugs, etc) & cleaner (ex: no shoes in the house) base population with mask wearing that probably don't meet up in large groups nowadays other than school.
While the poorer population of America is probably not that fit compared to the richer, which is why your seeing more of them dying probably.
Again, a small group of people of a dozen people max, all separated in small rooms. Not a church with hundreds all crammed together on pews singing hymns with their masks off.
Stereotypes don't really help as we don't know which of them matter if any, and to what degree. Japan also had mask shortages as they got most of their supply from China. They also depend much more on public transit and have smaller housing and public places. I want stats. For all we know it could be the amount of plosives and spitting in different languages that's the key.
By the way I don't know about you but I can't remember the last time I hugged someone outside my immediate family, and I may have shaken four hands in the last 12 months. I have a hard time believing that's very relevant, despite the high profile of such customs.
> One theory, Japanese wear masks. They didn't until the lockdown which was late
This is untrue. People in East Asia wear masks a lot more than any place else even without a pandemic. I started seeing a lot of masks in Tokyo in January itself. Softbank tested all their employees and the ones who were working in shops had less infections than the ones who worked at home, even though the number of people WFH were much lower than ones who worked in shops. Which gives a very solid backing to the theory that masks + personal hygiene is enough to keep this pandemic under control.
It's not untrue. I've lived in Japan 14 years. I have pictures from late March of people out and about without masks. Sure, it was not uncommon to see a few people wearing masks in Asia (and Japan) before the epidemic but it was not remotely everyone at any time until the lockdown in April. Usually an average train of 200 people might have 10-20 people with masks on (before the lockdown)
Here's pictures March 24th (and one in late Jan which shows zero masks)
So no, it's not because Japanese wear masks. I'm not saying that doesn't help but it's clearly not enough given how crowded the trains are and how late it was until everyone started wearing them
So how else do you explain SoftBank's testing results? The testing pool is large enough to not be an outlier, everything else was exactly the same for all their employees - their genetic pool, healthcare system, their cultural habits. The only difference was their level of alertness to personal hygiene. People working in stores were extra cautious of everything while who WFH were laid back and might have ended up slipping up more often, hence the higher cases.
One thing to remember is that we are still early in the pandemic, as long as it feels like it has already gone on.
It is hard to say for many localities whether they had a good response or just haven't been hit hard yet. A lot of states, and States, congratulated themselves early on for their low infection rates, only to spiral quickly or slowly out of control.
The current hypothesis on New York (and New England in general) is that it was hit so much earlier than the rest of the US because the flood of people returning all at once from Europe due to the travel lockdowns created a super-spreader event at the airports.
Which isn't to say New England didn't drop the ball early on; I'm saying instead the difference between places hit hard and places not might not be "good response/hygiene/culture" versus "bad", it might be "bad and lucky" versus "bad and unlucky".
Time and analysis will tell; I would wait a year or two to start naming the winners and losers.
Grew up in the East Bay in the mid/late 80s and was fortunate to get to run around from Pleasanton to Oakland/Berkeley and the city (SF). Traffic wasn't that bad.
Went to UC Santa Cruz for college (BA/BS -> ABD w/ MS in Comp Eng) and still was lucky to get up and enjoy things through the 90s.
2000s rolled around, traffic increased, going to the city (SF) wasn't as fun. The influx of people changed the nature of long time favorites (many no longer around.
That influx and the increase in population has seen long time restaurants close (rezoning - especially in places like Mountain View.
The HN take is "more density", "do away with rules", but there is a lack of respect for the history, the restaurants and markets pushed out because FB needed yet another low density campus off of El Camino and Rengstorff.
From the late 90s through the 2000s, the Bay Area changed. The influx of people from other areas, the demands of tech, etc have ruined it - at least for me. A side interest is preserving history, and Santa Clara County is pretty gungho about making sure most of that is buried due to the mighty dollar.
Where I am now, it's a place. It's not home for the future, but in the mountains, mostly quiet, and I have fiber. I'm privileged in that regard. And my job allows for such.
When it comes to the economy and housing, I've heard it phrased as "Growth, affordability, preservation: pick two".
So, in contrast to your post, I believe what has really destroyed the character of many cities is not that they've grown or had lots of outsiders move in (that's been going on forever when it comes to cities), but that restrictive zoning has made housing so expensive that a diverse range of incomes can no longer afford to live there.
If anything, making it extremely difficult to tear down a dilapidated laundromat to build more housing because that laundromat has been deemed "historic" is what is changing the character of cities for the worst.
Now this is just an opinion and no doubt others will disagree but I think a very similar thing is happening or has already happened in Seattle.
The dynamics have been driven by "tech", namely you-know-who, named after rainforest in South America nd their newly-minted cloud computing competitors.
Influx of people from other areas, both within US and international. "More density" and "do away with rules".
Another comment in this thread actually proposes the high rents are being driven by zoning. I find that hard to swallow. People in both commercial and residential real estate tell us about demand that is by and large coming from one general source: "tech". This is what has driven the rates higher.
I do not want to sound like another person looking to take jabs at the tech industry however I think some of the folks coming into these places for these jobs lack a certain appreciation for what makes these places special. To put it bluntly their standards are lower. The market has reponded and is giving them want they want; the number of city residences being built for rainforest workers is staggering. Yet I think we are losing something in the process and I am not sure the people moving in really have an appreciation for what is being lost. We cannot expect them to as they are new to the area.
I have Dutch ancestry, my ancestors were some of the first generations to settle in NY and I grew up there. Truth is that those generations of immigrants that came before the "tech workers" do have respect for what NYC is really about. They made NYC what it is. Just another opinion.
A part of what it is, yes. But that's the beauty of it: cities are constantly changing and building upon what came before. It's what makes them cities and not forgotten backwaters.
I have no opinion against change, per se. I think that is an unfair and incorrect reframing of someone's opinion. It is only the nature of certain changes I have an opinion about. It is like if someone has opinion about X, a single example of how to implement Y, and then someone else accuses them of being "against Y". Ridiculous.
"Change is good" is not what I'm trying to say. The point is that change is a fundamental attribute of cities. Trying to claim that a city should retain the characteristics it had when you moved there flies in the face of all the change that took place to make it that way that way. The only thing you can do is lean into the change and try to steer it in positive directions.
I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a fair chance GP was somebody else's version of a "techie" when they moved to Seattle. Most likely that someone else was equally salty about the changing demographics.
I was the third generation to live in our house growing up. When my grandparents moved there they tell the story like there were gravel roads and no traffic lights. Today there’s a Washington, DC Metro station (Well it supposedly opens in a few months time). There are bike lanes. And tech companies. And apartments. And to be honest I think the area is better off for it. It’s certainly better than destroying even more forest and farm land for ever expanding suburbia.
I think the point I am trying to make is being missed. I am not against improving the city's facilities. This is the good part. I am saying that the improvments are, by and large, being made to satisfy a certain type of (new) resident.
I live in an 80 sqm apartment within walking distance of our city core. Its a historical mix of new medium-rise apartments, old Victorians, and workers cottages with several public transport lines running through it. Traffic is currently limited to 30kmh on my streets.
What the shut-downs has revealed to me is not "the revenge" of the suburbs, but a foisting of suburban lifestyle onto us against our will. Our libraries were shut,
our museums, our parks, our shops, our pools. There was no option to accept or manage the risks locally. Its important to remember, the disease didn't do this to us, this was a political response to it, which is a policy choice, not a certainty.
Meanwhile, the centres of suburban life were left comparatively untouched: shopping malls, big corporate supermarkets, etc, and people drove there and mixed and shopped almost like there was no pandemic. Again, the disease didn't do this, people did. policy did.
In my city, where have the clusters of the disease have been: suburbs. some of that is definitely due to the shutting of the city, but policy has been enacted under the assumption that suburban life is the only life.
We just had a slight tightening of conditions because of a (very small) rise in cases: why? two reasons, putting returning travellers in cbd hotels as part of quarantine, and parties and socialising amongst known infected cases in... you guessed it, suburbia. Apparently, because of this, cafes and businesses in the inner city need to be further restrained for another 3 weeks.
for me, the pandemic simply accentuated everything wrong with the suburban lifestyle (because I'm now forced to live it while my facilities are shut) and I'll continue to wait and lobby for the return of our actual (and personally, better) life.
there's no love of local politics here, but I'm not aware of any feeling that suburban/urban councils/local area governments are inherently superior/inferior to the others.
though (obviously?) I like the services my local government provides, here transport, health and education are state level decisions...
It's probably worth noting that the kind suburbia you're talking about, which sounds like Melbourne (same as me) according to your top comment, is different to what is meant by suburbia in the U.S. and thus in the article.
Melbourne's suburbia, where the latest outbreaks have happened, is all part of Melbourne's urban sprawl - i.e., there are no unpopulated gaps between the inner urban area and these suburbs. And the pattern of spread reflects that; cases that begin as returning international travellers, transmitting it to hotel workers, who then take it back to their neighbourhoods further out but still part of the same metropolis. Then families intermingle with others just a few localities away, and off it goes.
Suburbs in the U.S. are more separate from the main urban centres, and are more self-contained, so there's less intermingling of people from one town to another. They're more like what we think of as rural cities like Ballarat, Geelong, Shepparton, etc.
In the past few years my partner and I moved out of inner Melbourne to the Mornington Peninsula to be closer nature and have more space for raising a family, and this feels more like the suburbia of the U.S., with localities like Frankston, Mt Eliza, Mornington and the towns further down all being quite spread out.
And so far, touch wood, the state of viral spread bears this out, with no new cases reported for a few weeks in either Frankston City or MP Shire, and indeed very few cases since the initial wave in March, which was mostly returned travellers. That said, Frankston is not insulated from the rest of Melbourne and is right next to Casey, where there are new cases, and the Peninsula gets lots of visitors from Melbourne, so there's still plenty of risk. (Edit: spoke too soon – one new case in MP Shire today, sigh.)
This is just another article that covers far too many topics all at once.
It says a lot while saying nothing.
And all the articles about COVID-19 will look silly in 3-5 years when it’s entirely not a concern. Predicting which aspects of life will stick as “the new normal” is a fools errand.
All the benefits of suburbia in the article are essentially negated by the drawbacks that the article mentions: suburbia sucks wealth away because the infrastructure costs too much to sustain. There really isn’t any way to get around that huge flaw.
It sucks wealth away because American towns have an addiction to using bond money to pay for infrastructure maintenance - infrastructure that will need to be replaced again before the bond is paid off.
They also have a habit of greenlighting development where the builders pay to build the roads and sewers that the town then takes over long term maintenance for, without accounting for the wealth generation of those properties being unable to pay for them.
Part 3 of “the growth Ponzi scheme” illustrates this well:
Now, I also wouldn’t take Stong Towns as gospel but it’s not hard to look around and find crumbling American suburbs. Even the “nice” suburbs are drowning in debt despite good appearances.
And now, you’ve got millennials who are figuring out that no, they don’t need to own two cars (debt on wheels) and hoard stuff like their parents did. Millennials are urbanizing at a rapid rate and it is not slowing down since they aren’t universally moving to the suburbs once they have (a smaller quantity of) kids like their parents did.
The boomer generation grew up in an era of crime-laden cities that simply doesn’t exist anymore and may never again exist. Without the inner city crime of previous decades one has to ask what suburban life actually gets you in comparison.
Cities can’t maintain their infrastructure either. Subways are a good example. The DC Metro still requires a subsidy, and is in disrepair, despite high use.
tl;dr people have been independently railing on the suburbs for centuries, but because they don't all live in dense urban environments they don't know what they are talking about?
or because the good thing about cities was removed and now suburbs compensate by being the exact same drab places as they were, but nothing more alluring exists currently?
what people like about cities, and what they hate about suburbs still exists. the former will just have to be read about in a book.
The problem is that the US have very few real dense cities, like what they call a city in Europe. That is, densely packed population, densely packed businesses, walkability, adequate public transportation that covers the entire area, all the things that allow an urbanite to comfortably live without owning a car, and streets are not very car-friendly anyway.
What are these cities? NYC (not only Manhattan but everywhere the subway + buses reach), Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Seattle. Maybe a few others with some reservations, like Washington DC or SF.
I have hard time seeing places like Houston or LA as "cities" in the same sense; they have small downtowns and huge suburb-like agglomerations around them, where you are either inside your house, or inside a car. Silicon Valley seems to largely lack cities, except the ailing SF.
If you want to see what a functioning large city looks like, visit NYC, or London, or Amsterdam, or Moscow, or Shanghai, or Singapore.
I think your points are good, but not everyplace needs to be a high functioning mega city. Better design can make better places, even in the surburbs. It doesn't even have to be new design. I'm reminded of places like Reston, Virginia which was designed specifically for most of the things you mention, but is also decidedly suburban. There's an urban core, but most homes are reasonably walkable to some local shopping or some other major amenity. It was also designed as an enclosed area, to contain substantial commercial and office areas, and a mix of densities and housing types so that it might be possible to both live and work within the same environment.
I don't think it's "hard" but it has to be purposeful. Too many areas in the U.S. are built by developers who dump the development once the human units are moved in and have no stake in long-term governance of the area.
Yes, I'm not advocating to turn every place into a city. I just try to note that bona fide "city experience" is not very widely available in the US, and many places that people consider "cities" are dubiously so.
I've lived in Amsterdam for a decade, which I affectionately call the largest village I've ever lived. The Netherlands has no cities of 1M+, yet is one of the densest countries in the world. How? Its quite multi centered. There's a lot of 50-500k towns in close vicinity, each with their own facilities and economies. Because of proximity they're of course not independent, but they're definitely not suburbs. There are towns you could say are suburbs, where people usually commute by car, but somehow they're not nearly as car exclusive of American suburbs. Maybe its worth a closer look at this.
They both sort of fit, but NIMBYism in SF hampers its development more than Seattle. Seattle appears more functional to me. (No city is perfect; for each one I mentioned I could list a number of problems, except maybe Amsterdam which I know rather poorly.)
This is why I avoid cities in the USA. Having lived in "real" cities before (some huge like Shanghai, some small like Bordeaux, all without a car), living in a typical US city would be such a painful daily reminder of the downgrade that I went straight for the suburbs instead. I would love to live in NYC for a few years, but it's the only one I'd consider so far. I hope to visit the other ones you mentioned some day.
Boston is great, I could imagine myself living there. I grow up in Budapest and now I live in London.
I lived in Boston for 2 months due to work. I commuted from Alewife to the city center with the T. The CBD is walkable, and when you have to go further public transportation is good enough. Last time I was there I saw a lot of new cycle lanes, now that's an option too.
My last home (detached house) was a in very suburban mega development (about 20k people), but was walking distance to public transit (commuter bus), movies, gym, library, doctors, grocery, dentists, something like 15 different restaurants from fast food to high-end, coffee shop, and so on. It has something like 20 miles of trials, lots of green space, pools and so on. It wasn't a "downtown" but a designed commercial space in the middle of the development that made it pretty nice to live there. Anywhere outside of the development was decidedly not walkable, but not a terrible drive. While sections have very similar looking houses, there's lot of mixed sections with entirely different architecture making it not too boring.
I moved a couple years ago to a new place further in towards a major city, but in another, but much older, mega development (about 60k people). It's higher/mixed density. There's a city bus a 2-3 minute walk from my detached house which connects to the subway, I can walk to work (it's about 3 miles away) and a bit of shopping and dining within a couple easy 2 mile walks. There's several shopping areas scattered around, pools, and so on, and a reasonably large and growing urban core maybe 4 miles away, I usually drive to it, but I could probably take the bus. It was also designed with intense tree cover in mind and most of the area is absolutely bursting in mature trees and nature (including wildlife!). There's also an extensive trail system that provides relatively easy transit around all this stuff for walkers, hikers, bikers, and so on. Homes were built in an impossible number of styles in a wide mix of densities.
My point is, suburbs can be great places to live. Just like there are terrible suburbs, there's terrible urban areas as well -- not everywhere is Manhattan or San Francisco. But it doesn't mean they all suck. There's definitely a movement to make these areas more livable and to learn lessons from the past.
The article itself states that a majority of the US population lives in suburbs, and a supermajority lives in suburban built environments, in central city and suburbs alike.
How could living in the suburbs be so terrible if a supermajority of people live in detached single family homes in residential neighborhoods with suburban style zoning? Are all of these people imprisoned against their will?
In many cases, they are "imprisoned" against their will because zoning does not permit any other kind of development. The other problem is they are not paying the full cost of the suburban lifestyle. It is only sustainable through huge government subsidies.
I saw the ad from real estate developer who subdivided my neighborhood. They made a big deal that only 50 foot lots were for sale, No 25 Foot Lots!
That was 100 years ago. So were living with bad idea's from decades ago. A lot of which was written into codes.
Flips side of bad zoning you can look at old pictures of Pittsburgh when the steel mills were going full tilt. I can't figure out how anyone got any sleep.
> The other problem is they are not paying the full cost of the suburban lifestyle. It is only sustainable through huge government subsidies.
They're paying for it with taxes right? Or are the minority of people living in dense cities paying these huge subsidies for the supermajority in the suburbs?
> Are all of these people imprisoned against their will?
that's a bit of a dramatic way of putting it, but I think something like that is going on. two big reasons why americans like to live in suburbs are crime and schools. I don't think there's any inherent reason why crime and schools have to be worse in the city, but they usually are.
> But America is not South Korea or Singapore. Americans have been running away from dense, vertical design for a century. Those who already prefer sparse, low-slung living will likely use their fear of COVID-19 to entrench their preference.
More like Americans were sold a very particular dream of sparse living by car companies that later solidified with the racist/practical implications of how inner cities were perceived.
Also, it isn't just SK or Singapore. European cities tend to abhor sprawl as well. In some sense, it unique to the US and countries that culturally draw from the same ford-American dream.
> The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways
The idea that suburbs are resilient to the pandemic because of the unsustainable lack of shared spaces and inherent isolation is hilarious to me. Historically speaking, this is a once in a century thing. It won't and should not affect how generation defining decisions are made.
Full disclosure, there are very few things I hate as much as American suburbs and urban sprawl.
But, those who dislike dense American cities often seem to dislike things that have nothing to do with the density in the first place. The crime caused by inner cities is a result of white flight and racially driven policing of the last 50 years. The dead looking cityscape of some dense cities are a result of terrible urban planning. (American Urban design is known to be sub-par. Most European cities with similar constraints have implemented better and more practical solutions)
Chasing naive single minded goals such as "more density" or "more bike lanes" is not what freedom from suburbia looks like. Well thought-out urban design ends up being dense, with public transportation infrastructure and bike/walking friendly. But adding any of those things hap-hazardly to an old system that clearly was not designed to support it is stupidity.
Hopefully people understand that it doesn't have to be a choice between thoughtless dense urban development and Suburbia. There are other proven options out there.
> European cities tend to abhor sprawl as well. In some sense, it unique to the US and countries that culturally draw from the same ford-American dream.
That's absolutely not my experience in Germany. If they can afford it, plenty of people move to the edge of the city or a bit outside it. They want access to the city, but they also want a spacious garden and quiet neighbors and don't need to live "in the middle of it" when they have children (or, at least in my peer group, even when they don't have children but are approaching 40).
I wonder if it's a preference or just that there are fewer options. By US standards, all European countries are high density, e.g. Germany with ~25% of the US population is significantly smaller than California, maybe 5% of the size of the US.
They're far older concentration processes, which is a factor ignored by other comments about why. The US is still filling in, settling, its vast territory. European territory is mostly settled, the cities are established, their process of forming major new cities is mostly over.
In 1940 the Las Vegas metro area had only a couple tens of thousands of people. Now it has 2.25 million - a metro larger than Slovenia, Latvia or Estonia. In 1940 the Austin Texas metro maybe had 100k people, now it's 2.1m. Texas of course has many examples of rapid population expansion metros, as new, large urban or semi-urban areas get created. Utah didn't exist as a state until 1896 and its population has increased over ten fold since then; its population has increased 300 fold in 150 years. In the late 19th century, Phoenix had only several thousand people, now the metro is approaching five million (equivalent to adding an Ireland, Norway, Finland or Denmark).
Paris by amusing contrast is of course over two millennia old. European populations have been concentrating into their cities, and emptying their surrounding lands, for far longer than the US has existed.
I have a daughter and a baby boy on the way. A few years ago we moved to a suburb (a ferry ride away and then some, not Bainbridge) of Seattle, and I'm glad we did. The commute is pretty long when I have to go into the office, but thanks(?) to COVID my employer now has a true WFH-friendly infrastructure and a management team that no longer fears remote productivity. I love gardening and walking down to a relatively quiet waterfront, my little downtown, and seeing my kids run around in the yard safely knowing we are far from the burning cop cars of Seattle just a few weeks ago.
Living in Queen Anne isn't much different, it's just 10x more expensive and you have a couple more restaurants. We manage just fine.
This COVID-19 induced remote work experiment has really been interesting.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the IT/software revolution was just how much industry centralization (e.g., Silicon Valley, Seattle, and later San Francisco/Shanghai/Paris/etc...) impacted competitiveness & employee wages.
It should have been the opposite - the diffusion of communication infrastructure (and information in general) should have made it easier for companies to outsource work to cheaper locations. This turned out to not be the case, at least in software, for a number of reasons - one of the main ones being that high performing employees on the whole prefer living in and around convenient urban locations.
Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, it will be interesting to see if this trend reverses.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadAs an aside, the article refers to "the suburban wine room." I have yet to see someone with a "wine room"; is this commonplace? A regional difference, perhaps? It also refers to "his-and-hers walk-in closets"; I don't know any guy with his own walk-in closet excepting those that live in apartments that came with one.
Houston doesn't have explicit zoning, which is true, but this doesn't mean that it's necessarily any easier to build dense housing if that's what the market demands.
- Deed restrictions effectively work as zoning by limiting what a given parcel can't be developed into, and they are city enforced; this restricts dense development, particularly in wealthy, high-amenity, high-convenience neighborhoods that might otherwise be more densely developed by natural forces.
- While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes. Mandated parking will drive up the cost of dense development because the minimums are set very high, and it means you either have to give over valuable floor space for parking, you have to build very expensive underground or structured parking, or a combination of the two. By indirectly driving up the cost of dense development, minimum parking regulations makes less of it pencil out.
If dense living was not in demand and undersupplied (which I believe it is), dense apartments would not fetch more per sq ft than a house in a low density suburb, at least not successfully.
This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any similarly sized US city.
The trick here is that many of the rules are designed for maximum possible need, leading to a sea of lots that are never actually full. It’s silly to build all strip mallS with parking lots that will be comfortable in Black Friday if every store has a major holiday sales bias.
Building too much parking also has painful externalities, as walking, even from store to store, becomes problematic, and maintenance for those oversized lots is not free. It’s just that those externalities are legislated in as the status quo, so they are invisible unless you look somewhere else.
Turning that around: a lack of public transport options creates painful externalities on new construction (mandatory large parking lots) and the city (must put in multiplane roads for every new block).
> It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more you prioritize car use with requirements for large garages, large surface lots, and large, wide, high speed roads, the more you make transit and walking slower and less effective, and the more you drive people into cars.
Houston has very high parking requirements that are actually even higher than what you are describing; even for "micro-apartments", an apartment size characterized by ~2-300 sq ft total space that could probably only fit one person comfortably, the Houston code requires more than one parking space per unit. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/Req...
One market-based hint that the parking requirements are too high in most cities is that developers nearly always only build the minimum; if more was required you'd expect more people to go and above minimum requirements.
What am I missing out on by not being in the city centre? Shows? I don’t go to them. Restaurants? I have a dog with separation anxiety and a 4mo daughter - I’m not going to any restaurants. Street festivals? Spare me. Art and modern “culture”? Thanks, but no thanks.
I’m perfectly happy for other people to pack themselves into noisy, cramped apartments if they like, I just don’t understand why the HN crowd seems to automatically assume that’s what I should want.
Suburbs are great. Long may they continue.
I live in a city and (in normal times) work in a suburb ~20 miles away. my commute is pretty painless; it's just a straight shot down the interstate in the opposite direction of most other people. but once I get there, it's amazing how unpleasant it is to drive around in a place that was built from the ground up to accommodate cars. even the shortest trips involve driving to a highway, traveling on it for one or two exits, then getting off and driving to your destination. I have no idea how people get around on bikes there. there are several shopping centers that are only connected by a limited access highway. I often joke that in that suburb, no trip takes more than fifteen minutes by car, but none are shorter either.
I live on the outskirts of a midwestern city and only know a couple people who live in such homes.
Though I'm not from a wealthy background, so most of my family and friends (even in the suburbs) are in 1000-2000 sq ft houses where sometimes a 2nd bathroom is a nice amenity.
But we do have (usually unfinished) basements here which add at least a few hundred square feet of utility space to a house. I couldn't imagine life without one!
But, I grew up in the suburbs and now live in the city. I love both. I love that there are interesting places to walk to, coffee shops, bakeries, bars, restaurants, book stores, etc... but I miss the freedoms of my suburban childhood like a yard to play in, a garage for power tools and bikes, being able to be loud indoors at all hours, being able to have house parties or even just entertain 2-4 friends at any time of the day or night without annoying the neighbors, block parties, and even just knowing my neighbors well. Yes, I suppose I could do that in an apartment building but maybe because we live so close we don't want to know each other :P
There's definitely an in-between, medium density option that this article seems to ignore in favor of focusing on car-focused, isolated suburbs where everyone had 5 bedrooms and a pool.
The number one predictor of a school’s rating is the average income of its parents. Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school. City schools have poor kids and lower average test scores, but I don’t know anyone who chose the city schools by me and has regretted it.
This is somewhat true but it's missing a component I didn't realize was as important - you're getting relationships/networking even at these "good" schools. I know that sounds stupid but being around people of high socioeconomic status helps you learn unspoken signals and norms. On top of that - your peers will likely be going into high paying professions and will be able to help you make your way into that profession as well. Some people I know who went to these rich kid schools are happy that they did because it helped them. I rarely meet people who were like, "Yeah, going to that rich kid school was pointless. It had literally no effect on my life." I used to think I could just parent/teach my way out of any shit school and then I've watched my friends have kids. There's too much social stuff that can't be made up for by parents.
I'd be especially wary of putting a kid in a poor school. If you go to a poor school (rated or, especially, funded) then you will have to put in a lot more effort as a parent to get satisfactory results - and likely your kid will lose all childhood friendships as they age. People in poor schools frequently don't break out. If you're putting in the effort or your child is just generally exceptional then they'll break out... Which means they're leaving everyone behind and forging a path that none of their peers have done. It makes for an isolated experience and a really difficult one. If you've done it - great, you can help your kid but is that enjoyable? The programs for children who would be average or above average at a good school frequently don't exist at poor schools. Think AP courses, college credit, computer classes, advanced math and english, foreign language options, etc. I know because I had to go to a school that could only afford 4 days a week and that had to cut almost every elective. I've stayed in contact with no one from that region because... well, there's not much of a point. I haven't spoken to anyone from that school in close to 10 or so years and I'm not even 30.
That said - if you or your kid has no large ambitions or only ones that /somehow/ don't rely on any social components at all then it doesn't matter.
On the russian side, I'll make the preposterous claim that Crimea had to be "liberated", because otherwise how else were non-Moscow parents supposed to be able to send their kids to Artek[3] for the summer?
[1] undoubtedly thought of as an expansion on the 1966 system: https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813
[2] what are current premiums for houses with "good schools?"
[3] https://artek.org
Granted, I live in the midwest where public schools are, as a general rule, pretty good. One of the reasons we moved to the town we did though is that they have a unified school system. I heard too many of my more well-off acquaintances making offhand comments amounting to "oh, you don't want to move there. They go to the poor people school."
If you think good schools are a public good, put your family where your mouth is.
I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money. IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty and all the problems that come with it.
IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.
Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).
Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that would be acceptable.
It isn't perfect, but it seems like attracting interest via magnet programs works a lot better than throwing more money at failing schools or unequal access to charter schools.
Where I grew up there was a gang fight at the public school where one student stabbed another.
Yea I realized after posting that the wording is probably not quite correct. What I meant is there is a single school that serves the entire district. Technically, there are several buildings, but they are broken up by grade elementary / middle / high schools.
Perhaps. In the US, there's the small matter of the 14th Amendment.
Meanwhile, my child who is in a medium rated school in a poorly rated school district is learning critical thinking skills that I didn't even know were necessary until I started flunking out of college. As a second grader, he not only can keep up with math and science and writing standards for his age group, but he can actually apply it: I'm constantly seeing him take real world problems and figure out how to use something he learned in school to solve that problem, whether by building a mental mathematical model or designing an experiment, or using a resource like a dictionary to help him understand a word he doesn't know. My world was never like that...I thought of school as an intake of knowledge that had to be memorized, not as a way of learning.
I'm not putting these motivations into your mouth, but I get the feeling like school ratings are merely a subconscious correlation with whiteness, and as long as you aren't completely checked out from your child's life, you can ignore them completely.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en
People come up with all kinds of theories but none of them seem to fit. One theory, Japanese wear masks. They didn't until the lockdown which was late. They've mostly unlocked now and restaurants seem relatively busy. Of course (almost) everyone is still wearing a mask and lots of precautions are in place but at a glance seeing the still crowded trains and now crowded restaurants it's hard to figure out why the numbers stay so low.
Some people claim not enough testing but if that's all it was there would still be a death rate climb and arguably an ICU overflow and that hasn't happened either.
I have been puzzling over the Japan situation from the beginning. They go against a lot of narrative about why the US got so bad. People would wave them off with conspiracy theories about the Olympics. We definitely need some much better survey data.
While the poorer population of America is probably not that fit compared to the richer, which is why your seeing more of them dying probably.
You haven't been to Nomikais I believe.
Loud singing/talking has been shown to increase coronavirus / droplet transmissions.
By the way I don't know about you but I can't remember the last time I hugged someone outside my immediate family, and I may have shaken four hands in the last 12 months. I have a hard time believing that's very relevant, despite the high profile of such customs.
This is untrue. People in East Asia wear masks a lot more than any place else even without a pandemic. I started seeing a lot of masks in Tokyo in January itself. Softbank tested all their employees and the ones who were working in shops had less infections than the ones who worked at home, even though the number of people WFH were much lower than ones who worked in shops. Which gives a very solid backing to the theory that masks + personal hygiene is enough to keep this pandemic under control.
Source for the softbank tests - https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/SoftBank-condu...
Here's pictures March 24th (and one in late Jan which shows zero masks)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/aUWB5YB6vBnjZk8j6
So no, it's not because Japanese wear masks. I'm not saying that doesn't help but it's clearly not enough given how crowded the trains are and how late it was until everyone started wearing them
It is hard to say for many localities whether they had a good response or just haven't been hit hard yet. A lot of states, and States, congratulated themselves early on for their low infection rates, only to spiral quickly or slowly out of control.
The current hypothesis on New York (and New England in general) is that it was hit so much earlier than the rest of the US because the flood of people returning all at once from Europe due to the travel lockdowns created a super-spreader event at the airports.
Which isn't to say New England didn't drop the ball early on; I'm saying instead the difference between places hit hard and places not might not be "good response/hygiene/culture" versus "bad", it might be "bad and lucky" versus "bad and unlucky".
Time and analysis will tell; I would wait a year or two to start naming the winners and losers.
Grew up in the East Bay in the mid/late 80s and was fortunate to get to run around from Pleasanton to Oakland/Berkeley and the city (SF). Traffic wasn't that bad.
Went to UC Santa Cruz for college (BA/BS -> ABD w/ MS in Comp Eng) and still was lucky to get up and enjoy things through the 90s.
2000s rolled around, traffic increased, going to the city (SF) wasn't as fun. The influx of people changed the nature of long time favorites (many no longer around.
That influx and the increase in population has seen long time restaurants close (rezoning - especially in places like Mountain View.
The HN take is "more density", "do away with rules", but there is a lack of respect for the history, the restaurants and markets pushed out because FB needed yet another low density campus off of El Camino and Rengstorff.
From the late 90s through the 2000s, the Bay Area changed. The influx of people from other areas, the demands of tech, etc have ruined it - at least for me. A side interest is preserving history, and Santa Clara County is pretty gungho about making sure most of that is buried due to the mighty dollar.
Where I am now, it's a place. It's not home for the future, but in the mountains, mostly quiet, and I have fiber. I'm privileged in that regard. And my job allows for such.
So, in contrast to your post, I believe what has really destroyed the character of many cities is not that they've grown or had lots of outsiders move in (that's been going on forever when it comes to cities), but that restrictive zoning has made housing so expensive that a diverse range of incomes can no longer afford to live there.
If anything, making it extremely difficult to tear down a dilapidated laundromat to build more housing because that laundromat has been deemed "historic" is what is changing the character of cities for the worst.
The dynamics have been driven by "tech", namely you-know-who, named after rainforest in South America nd their newly-minted cloud computing competitors.
Influx of people from other areas, both within US and international. "More density" and "do away with rules".
Another comment in this thread actually proposes the high rents are being driven by zoning. I find that hard to swallow. People in both commercial and residential real estate tell us about demand that is by and large coming from one general source: "tech". This is what has driven the rates higher.
I do not want to sound like another person looking to take jabs at the tech industry however I think some of the folks coming into these places for these jobs lack a certain appreciation for what makes these places special. To put it bluntly their standards are lower. The market has reponded and is giving them want they want; the number of city residences being built for rainforest workers is staggering. Yet I think we are losing something in the process and I am not sure the people moving in really have an appreciation for what is being lost. We cannot expect them to as they are new to the area.
I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a fair chance GP was somebody else's version of a "techie" when they moved to Seattle. Most likely that someone else was equally salty about the changing demographics.
It’s a broken record. If only those people there would get out of the way and make way for the brave new world as god intended for capitalism.
What the shut-downs has revealed to me is not "the revenge" of the suburbs, but a foisting of suburban lifestyle onto us against our will. Our libraries were shut, our museums, our parks, our shops, our pools. There was no option to accept or manage the risks locally. Its important to remember, the disease didn't do this to us, this was a political response to it, which is a policy choice, not a certainty.
Meanwhile, the centres of suburban life were left comparatively untouched: shopping malls, big corporate supermarkets, etc, and people drove there and mixed and shopped almost like there was no pandemic. Again, the disease didn't do this, people did. policy did.
In my city, where have the clusters of the disease have been: suburbs. some of that is definitely due to the shutting of the city, but policy has been enacted under the assumption that suburban life is the only life.
We just had a slight tightening of conditions because of a (very small) rise in cases: why? two reasons, putting returning travellers in cbd hotels as part of quarantine, and parties and socialising amongst known infected cases in... you guessed it, suburbia. Apparently, because of this, cafes and businesses in the inner city need to be further restrained for another 3 weeks.
for me, the pandemic simply accentuated everything wrong with the suburban lifestyle (because I'm now forced to live it while my facilities are shut) and I'll continue to wait and lobby for the return of our actual (and personally, better) life.
there's no love of local politics here, but I'm not aware of any feeling that suburban/urban councils/local area governments are inherently superior/inferior to the others.
though (obviously?) I like the services my local government provides, here transport, health and education are state level decisions...
Melbourne's suburbia, where the latest outbreaks have happened, is all part of Melbourne's urban sprawl - i.e., there are no unpopulated gaps between the inner urban area and these suburbs. And the pattern of spread reflects that; cases that begin as returning international travellers, transmitting it to hotel workers, who then take it back to their neighbourhoods further out but still part of the same metropolis. Then families intermingle with others just a few localities away, and off it goes.
Suburbs in the U.S. are more separate from the main urban centres, and are more self-contained, so there's less intermingling of people from one town to another. They're more like what we think of as rural cities like Ballarat, Geelong, Shepparton, etc.
In the past few years my partner and I moved out of inner Melbourne to the Mornington Peninsula to be closer nature and have more space for raising a family, and this feels more like the suburbia of the U.S., with localities like Frankston, Mt Eliza, Mornington and the towns further down all being quite spread out.
And so far, touch wood, the state of viral spread bears this out, with no new cases reported for a few weeks in either Frankston City or MP Shire, and indeed very few cases since the initial wave in March, which was mostly returned travellers. That said, Frankston is not insulated from the rest of Melbourne and is right next to Casey, where there are new cases, and the Peninsula gets lots of visitors from Melbourne, so there's still plenty of risk. (Edit: spoke too soon – one new case in MP Shire today, sigh.)
The lockdown, which has been of different levels depending on the city, has worked well here. Schools have been back in much of Australia for weeks.
Australian numbers below.
https://covidlive.com.au/
It says a lot while saying nothing.
And all the articles about COVID-19 will look silly in 3-5 years when it’s entirely not a concern. Predicting which aspects of life will stick as “the new normal” is a fools errand.
All the benefits of suburbia in the article are essentially negated by the drawbacks that the article mentions: suburbia sucks wealth away because the infrastructure costs too much to sustain. There really isn’t any way to get around that huge flaw.
While cost to sustain is relatively static, the price homeowners are willing to endure for the upsides of suburbia are dynamic.
In a world plagued by pandemics and social unrest, that price continues to rise. Remote work will only accelerate this trend.
They also have a habit of greenlighting development where the builders pay to build the roads and sewers that the town then takes over long term maintenance for, without accounting for the wealth generation of those properties being unable to pay for them.
Part 3 of “the growth Ponzi scheme” illustrates this well:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/15/the-growth-pon...
Now, I also wouldn’t take Stong Towns as gospel but it’s not hard to look around and find crumbling American suburbs. Even the “nice” suburbs are drowning in debt despite good appearances.
And now, you’ve got millennials who are figuring out that no, they don’t need to own two cars (debt on wheels) and hoard stuff like their parents did. Millennials are urbanizing at a rapid rate and it is not slowing down since they aren’t universally moving to the suburbs once they have (a smaller quantity of) kids like their parents did.
The boomer generation grew up in an era of crime-laden cities that simply doesn’t exist anymore and may never again exist. Without the inner city crime of previous decades one has to ask what suburban life actually gets you in comparison.
or because the good thing about cities was removed and now suburbs compensate by being the exact same drab places as they were, but nothing more alluring exists currently?
what people like about cities, and what they hate about suburbs still exists. the former will just have to be read about in a book.
What are these cities? NYC (not only Manhattan but everywhere the subway + buses reach), Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Seattle. Maybe a few others with some reservations, like Washington DC or SF.
I have hard time seeing places like Houston or LA as "cities" in the same sense; they have small downtowns and huge suburb-like agglomerations around them, where you are either inside your house, or inside a car. Silicon Valley seems to largely lack cities, except the ailing SF.
If you want to see what a functioning large city looks like, visit NYC, or London, or Amsterdam, or Moscow, or Shanghai, or Singapore.
[Edited: spelling]
I don't think it's "hard" but it has to be purposeful. Too many areas in the U.S. are built by developers who dump the development once the human units are moved in and have no stake in long-term governance of the area.
Out of curiosity, what makes Seattle fit this description and not SF?
I lived in Boston for 2 months due to work. I commuted from Alewife to the city center with the T. The CBD is walkable, and when you have to go further public transportation is good enough. Last time I was there I saw a lot of new cycle lanes, now that's an option too.
My last home (detached house) was a in very suburban mega development (about 20k people), but was walking distance to public transit (commuter bus), movies, gym, library, doctors, grocery, dentists, something like 15 different restaurants from fast food to high-end, coffee shop, and so on. It has something like 20 miles of trials, lots of green space, pools and so on. It wasn't a "downtown" but a designed commercial space in the middle of the development that made it pretty nice to live there. Anywhere outside of the development was decidedly not walkable, but not a terrible drive. While sections have very similar looking houses, there's lot of mixed sections with entirely different architecture making it not too boring.
I moved a couple years ago to a new place further in towards a major city, but in another, but much older, mega development (about 60k people). It's higher/mixed density. There's a city bus a 2-3 minute walk from my detached house which connects to the subway, I can walk to work (it's about 3 miles away) and a bit of shopping and dining within a couple easy 2 mile walks. There's several shopping areas scattered around, pools, and so on, and a reasonably large and growing urban core maybe 4 miles away, I usually drive to it, but I could probably take the bus. It was also designed with intense tree cover in mind and most of the area is absolutely bursting in mature trees and nature (including wildlife!). There's also an extensive trail system that provides relatively easy transit around all this stuff for walkers, hikers, bikers, and so on. Homes were built in an impossible number of styles in a wide mix of densities.
My point is, suburbs can be great places to live. Just like there are terrible suburbs, there's terrible urban areas as well -- not everywhere is Manhattan or San Francisco. But it doesn't mean they all suck. There's definitely a movement to make these areas more livable and to learn lessons from the past.
How could living in the suburbs be so terrible if a supermajority of people live in detached single family homes in residential neighborhoods with suburban style zoning? Are all of these people imprisoned against their will?
That was 100 years ago. So were living with bad idea's from decades ago. A lot of which was written into codes.
Flips side of bad zoning you can look at old pictures of Pittsburgh when the steel mills were going full tilt. I can't figure out how anyone got any sleep.
https://www.shorpy.com/node/25168
They're paying for it with taxes right? Or are the minority of people living in dense cities paying these huge subsidies for the supermajority in the suburbs?
that's a bit of a dramatic way of putting it, but I think something like that is going on. two big reasons why americans like to live in suburbs are crime and schools. I don't think there's any inherent reason why crime and schools have to be worse in the city, but they usually are.
More like Americans were sold a very particular dream of sparse living by car companies that later solidified with the racist/practical implications of how inner cities were perceived.
Also, it isn't just SK or Singapore. European cities tend to abhor sprawl as well. In some sense, it unique to the US and countries that culturally draw from the same ford-American dream.
> The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways
The idea that suburbs are resilient to the pandemic because of the unsustainable lack of shared spaces and inherent isolation is hilarious to me. Historically speaking, this is a once in a century thing. It won't and should not affect how generation defining decisions are made.
Full disclosure, there are very few things I hate as much as American suburbs and urban sprawl.
But, those who dislike dense American cities often seem to dislike things that have nothing to do with the density in the first place. The crime caused by inner cities is a result of white flight and racially driven policing of the last 50 years. The dead looking cityscape of some dense cities are a result of terrible urban planning. (American Urban design is known to be sub-par. Most European cities with similar constraints have implemented better and more practical solutions)
Chasing naive single minded goals such as "more density" or "more bike lanes" is not what freedom from suburbia looks like. Well thought-out urban design ends up being dense, with public transportation infrastructure and bike/walking friendly. But adding any of those things hap-hazardly to an old system that clearly was not designed to support it is stupidity.
Hopefully people understand that it doesn't have to be a choice between thoughtless dense urban development and Suburbia. There are other proven options out there.
That's absolutely not my experience in Germany. If they can afford it, plenty of people move to the edge of the city or a bit outside it. They want access to the city, but they also want a spacious garden and quiet neighbors and don't need to live "in the middle of it" when they have children (or, at least in my peer group, even when they don't have children but are approaching 40).
But leaving personal preferences and anecdotes aside, if we look at the data, Europe definitely prefers density compared to the US:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/World_po...
In 1940 the Las Vegas metro area had only a couple tens of thousands of people. Now it has 2.25 million - a metro larger than Slovenia, Latvia or Estonia. In 1940 the Austin Texas metro maybe had 100k people, now it's 2.1m. Texas of course has many examples of rapid population expansion metros, as new, large urban or semi-urban areas get created. Utah didn't exist as a state until 1896 and its population has increased over ten fold since then; its population has increased 300 fold in 150 years. In the late 19th century, Phoenix had only several thousand people, now the metro is approaching five million (equivalent to adding an Ireland, Norway, Finland or Denmark).
Paris by amusing contrast is of course over two millennia old. European populations have been concentrating into their cities, and emptying their surrounding lands, for far longer than the US has existed.
Living in Queen Anne isn't much different, it's just 10x more expensive and you have a couple more restaurants. We manage just fine.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the IT/software revolution was just how much industry centralization (e.g., Silicon Valley, Seattle, and later San Francisco/Shanghai/Paris/etc...) impacted competitiveness & employee wages.
It should have been the opposite - the diffusion of communication infrastructure (and information in general) should have made it easier for companies to outsource work to cheaper locations. This turned out to not be the case, at least in software, for a number of reasons - one of the main ones being that high performing employees on the whole prefer living in and around convenient urban locations.
Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, it will be interesting to see if this trend reverses.