What most academics and others like them tend to miss about the American suburbs, is that most Americans like their suburbs.
The American suburbs are the Toyota Camry of housing. Kind of boring and somewhat ugly, but affordable, functional, and ultimately well-liked by the end-user.
Anecdotally, I met thousands of Americans in my life, and I'd say the vast majority of them never cease to praise the life and balance of small European cities.
Partly I'd say it's about real estate ownership. In the US, living in a city means either spending enormous sums on real estate (suffocatingly so) or renting. But in the US, real estate ownership is incentivized as a primary way to build wealth and stability for old age and retirement. Thus, rent is viewed as a short term living situation. But, affordable real estate that acts to build wealth, especially for people who needed to spend their early career paying off student loans or don't have parents that can buy them a down payment, can only be found in the suburbs.
So it seems to be more structural due to government. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I like having a big yard with dogs and a cul-de-sac for my kids to play in.
As an actual American, I've never heard anyone talk about small European cities. Are you from Europe? If you're only talking to American tourists in Europe, there's going to be some strong selection bias favoring people who like Europe and want to visit.
Well, and with respect to cities generally, there are many cities I like to visit quite a bit that I really wouldn't care that much to live in--especially if it meant giving up my ex-urban/rural home.
Let me add my own anecdote about the bubble I live in. I currently live in a Asian city where nearly everyone lives in apartments and takes very good transit (although cars are very popular despite the massive import taxes). Coming from the US, I’ve been told many times how envious they are that one can buy a single family home in the US, not share walls with neighbors and have a home over 1,000 at ft (rare to find one over 900 here, most are 600-700 2 beds). That type of single family housing is purely for the ultra rich here. Not within reach of the even the upper middle class.
Though unlike the Camry, the “affordability” is a mirage derived from being heavily subsidized by state and federal tax codes, decisions about how to prioritize infrastructure spending to promote sprawl, and zoning and housing policies that discourage any other form of development.
Is there evidence for your claim? How many were (made) aware of alternatives? It's easy to accept local customs, so much so that you think you like them, but that doesn't really prove anything more than that habituation is a thing.
Its not Stockholm syndrome. I have lived in urban cities as well as rural settings. I like my suburban lifestyle.
You like the city or rural living? Great. You do you.
Don’t assume because other people choose something different than you that they must be ignorant to the other options. It just different. Not wrong.
Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?
Also, suburbs are only affordable because we continue to defer infrastructure maintenance. At some point, we will have to pay to maintain all the bridges, roads, etc.
I'm not anti-suburb necessarily. But, I do loathe the car-based culture we've created. And the rage that any mention of alternative transport seems to elicit among many suburb dwellers (who also love to bitch about traffic problems, but only want more tarmac as a solution).
I think a lot of the rage against alternative transit is the apparent bias among many such proponents to "First, we make car travel much, much less appealing; only after that's accomplished, then we'll hope to make alternative modes competitive with the nerfed version of private automobiles."
I had encountered unexpected hostility against cyclist on the road. No making car travel unappealing was involved, just someone existed on bike and someone else somehow took it as provocation.
That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).
Local example: I live in Reston VA. We've slowly been adding bike lanes to existing roads as other improvements are made. In some cases, this required cutting from 2 lanes to 1 lane. However, in all cases, traffic timings and accident analysis was undertaken and in all cases that I've seen, traffic flow either improved or if there was a decrease, it was on the order of 1-2 seconds per mile traveled. Additionally, in most cases, traffic accidents of all kinds were reduced.
But, you wouldn't know it from listening to the anti-bike crowd. They see the reduction in lane count and immediately jump to "nobody rides bikes!", "run them over" or worse. Seriously, it's that bad.
I'll also add that in some places, the bike lanes are rarely used, but that's as as direct result of poor designs created to silence the noisy motorists. Another local example - the main thoroughfare along my neighborhood has bike lanes. However, the lanes stop just prior to the two places you would want to ride your bike - the high school and the shopping center. So, of course fewer people use the lanes - they don't actually GO anywhere! It's infuriating.
Edit - the sidewalks along this same thoroughfare also start/stop or switch sides. This makes it less tenable to walk to the school or shopping (the road is about 2 miles end-to-end; shopping center at one end, high school near mid-point). Lots of people are within 1 mile of either destination, but running back and forth across a 45mph busy road is simply unsafe. A pedestrian was killed a year ago running from the sidewalk on one side to his home on the other. How the heck is this even to code? Argh.
Humans are emotional more than rational. Positive numbers won't outweigh the anecdote of being stuck in a traffic jam while the bike lanes sit there, effectively empty.
City planners and bicycle activists need to work with human nature, not against it.
The only traffic jam on the road outside my house is caused by the hundreds of high school kids driving themselves to school instead of riding a bike (which they can't do, because the bike lane doesn't go that far, because their parents demanded the road be left untouched to make room for more cars).
If over half of the high schoolers driving by your place would really chose to ride a bike instead of driving... Well, the high schoolers you know appear to be quite different than the high schoolers I know.
Even myself - I couldn't wait to be able to drive to high school, nevermind the bus, my bicycle, carpooling with neighbors, etc.
Getting a car at 16 is only a thing because it means freedom from having mom/dad drive you everywhere. If alternate transit existed, this would resolve itself.
The urban planner who decided to drop a major employment center inside the triangle made by 3 massive highways (with little/no housing, no transit access, and ridiculous street layout) needs a kick in the crotch.
> That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).
In my experience what "first we make car transport less and less appealing" translates to is "we should allocate some of this land dedicated to free parking for other uses."
Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking. But suburbanites insist that city-dwellers should shoulder the opportunity cost of making their wasteful transportation choices more convenient for them.
Often it’s the businesses nearby that want that parking to remain. If you don’t give people a convenient means to come from where they live to where your business is, you can’t get their shopping dollar. I don’t care if it’s hard to get there; I’ll just shop someplace else that is convenient.
I live on the edge of a city. Most of my shopping is out in the suburbs as they crush the city core on convenience of time and transport (and often on price due to overhead).
This could maybe be viable for malls, stadiums, or huge residential buildings. But I don't see it working for rowhome/townhome heavy areas. Just not enough scale to be worth it.
I agree, I completely rely on transit and don’t own a car, but it’s clear a lot of activists want to penalize owning a car. Transit can out compete car ownership on its own merits (see NYC, DC & Boston) but it requires significant investment which most are unwilling to accept. Imo the fundamental problem is that most activists are fundamentally fairly left leaning and public/private partnerships would be the best way to build out subway/light rail systems in up and coming cities. Due to ideological commitments they’re unwilling to consider this option.
in LA, almost every train stop has nothing over it, like no retail, no commercial, and no residential at all. it's such an easy win to have a commercial developer build a 6-story mixed use complex right on top of the station. but no, we need to make sure everyone has to walk at least 1/3 of a mile to their final destination.
That's one place northern VA is doing ok, finally. With the Metro extension to Dulles Airport (and beyond), they did revise the zoning and development plans in the blocks surrounding the stations. Millions of sqft of mixed-use developments are going in where previously it was low-rise office and massive spans of asphalt parking.
Part of it is economics - proximity to the metro made the land more valuable. But part was the county BOD and planning commissions putting their foot down and making changes to zoning (changes to min parking requirements, changes to housing density, etc).
As somebody who lives across the street from the edge of one of these zones, it's a mixed bag. I get to walk to work. Next year, there will be a new grocer on my way. Pretty good. The downside is more traffic, especially on bridges across the airport access road (we really need 4-5 instead of the 3 that exist today). And, as land values have gone up, developers are trying their hardest to buy up parkland and convert it to condos/offices.
The more competent proponents of alternative transport start by making the alternative transport better than cars.
San Francisco is almost a credible example. Pre-Covid, it was quite common to want to go from point A near Market Street to point B, 1-2 miles away, also near Market street. This could easily take 45 minutes by car or 5-10 min by bike. If the BART or Muni went to the right place, you had a Clipper card so you didn’t need to navigate the atrocious payment system, and you didn’t need to use the elevator, it was reasonably fast. If the Market street improvements had gone quickly to every-five-minute bus service with a dedicated lane, the bus would have been a huge win over car/rideshare.
A lot of transit planners seem to fail to understand that good transit will be widely used even by affluent people as long as they trust that the transit is frequent (or runs on a real schedule and the schedule is accessible), has appropriate hours, and is clean and safe. Instead there are pilot programs with 1/4 the service, and they fail to attract 1/4 of the riders, because 1/4 of the service is simply not a good alternative to a car.
It’s like the Caltrain wondering why the tech employee ridership isn’t great when the express service stops before all the programmers go to work. Or Sonic.net deciding to put fiber in the neighborhoods that already have a lot of customers of their DSL service.
1. You have a yard for you and your kids to play in. I know a number of people who love this. You can send the kids out to the yard without having to be there with them. When the weather is nice you can do this most days. And, the kids can have a blast doing it.
2. You can grow a garden. Flower garden or vegetable garden... I know a number of people who do this. This brings them pleasure in multiple forms.
3. It's a place that's yours rather than someone else's. When you rent there is someone else that owns it and you live there. Some people like to own and have more control over their space. It's about agency.
Technically true; we own* such a place in Cambridge, MA. It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though. Structurally, I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.
Which in turn means someone of median (or even 75th percentile) income who wants to buy a house with a yard big enough for kids to meaningfully play in isn't going to do so in Cambridge, but can readily do it in a number of suburbs within an hour's commuting distance of Cambridge/Boston.
* - or rather the bank owns more of it than we do and we’re slowly buying it from them...
> I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.
I see no reason why. Cambridge was, once upon a time, a streetcar suburb of Boston. There's no reason you can't just build more dense suburbs and outlying cities. You just don't need them to be car-dependent. There are tons of suburbs outside of major European cities that are just less dense and more family oriented while still being well served by transit and being walkable for all peoples' daily needs.
Having a private yard for your kids and their friends to play in (as listed #1 upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556317) is the thing that necessarily constrains maximum density. We have about 1/4 acre in the city. That’s somewhat more than the minimum, but you’ll be hard pressed to get 10 units per acre and have everyone have a meaningful yard.
Why does everyone need a meaningful yard? The point of mixed use development is that you mix housing aimed at people at various phases of their lives. There's no reason why everything has to be one or another. You can have a 10 unit multi-family building amidst a block of rowhomes.
There's also no reason all the land has to be personal and private. Condo buildings can have yards and gardens. Kids also do fine playing in public parks, rec centers, and playgrounds. There's a variety of built environments that serve families' needs that we simply do not build because of zoning restrictions. Singapore manages to build extremely densely, keep housing costs accessible to median income families, and still have their kids grow up happy and well adjusted. It's a policy choice America makes to be this wasteful and it's mostly done by making it illegal to build any other way.
Not everyone needs it, obviously. Many people want it, also fairly obviously. This subthread is discussing the preferences of families who do and those units will, by geometric necessity, have a lower maximum density.
Some of the benefits: During COVID, we put up a trampoline for the kids to play on and get some exercise. Private yard meant we didn’t have to ask or fight anyone about it and there’s no additional COVID risk because everyone already lives together.
We put up a vegetable garden as well; no one is bothered by it.
Plenty of people want to (or are okay with) live in high-density housing in an urban environment. Not everyone does; as you say, there’s no reason everything has to be one or the other.
> It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though.
Unless you have building codes that encourages the same type of domiciles as 'the city'. The Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto used to be a suburb of "the city", but now it is in the city, and the houses have big lots, lanes/garages, and plenty of square footage:
They're expensive now because urban living is cool again, but up until the late-1990s/early-2000s, land was not that expensive "in the city": urban living was generally considered only for immigrants, and the WASPs lived out in the 'burbs.
For some stuff that's a little less palatial, just go up the street for some good examples:
>Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?
Many Americans do have real-life experience of living in dense cities but still prefer suburbs because of their stage in life. A copy & paste of another comment outlining common multi-decade life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc. Yes this means the proverbial "soccer mom" with a SUV to drive the kids to sports practice, ballet lessons, etc
- retired and kids are grown and gone leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move back to a city condo and enjoy walking to museums again
So the suburbs are attracting the knowledgeable former city dwellers. Yes, lower land cost (and hence cheaper sq ft) is definitely part of it but not the only advantage. Some do like the quieter streets, a garage to pursue hobbies, a yard for barbeques, less crime, etc.
Nothing wrong with saying that, but it's a loose characterization based strictly on opinion.
There's real and tangible problems with urban/sub-urban planning in the USA that go far deeper than whether someone "likes" something. It deserves exploration and critique. It's not merely a consumer choice.
I completely agree, most people like their suburbs. However, I do wonder if there's a connection between American suburbanization and our mental health crisis. Modern suburbs are kind of anti-community and anti-human compared to most historical cities and towns.
You're surrounded by people, but miss out on a lot of the small interactions that come from being close together. You're dependent on a car, so regularly stuck in traffic and can't go anywhere on your own. The boring/ugly aspects might be uninspiring. All fo this is "normal" so you don't notice it in your day to day life, but it adds up.
I'm probably completely wrong here, but when I see the massive mental health and drug issues from otherwise rich, stable, suburban families I wonder if there's a connection.
I have lived in suburbs, dense city and rural countryside. The density has no say on the quality of your neighbors or the extent to which you will interact with them.
In fact, if my anecdotal experience were made a rule, it would be "the more densely you pack people together the less they function as a community". Of course it isnt true as a rule, but it has been my personal experience.
I think this has more to do with you and the local culture (like, block-by-block) than urban vs. suburban. in the suburbs, you can drive back and forth between your home garage and office and never speak to anyone. but you can do the same thing on foot in a city. in my city, people don't usually strike up conversations with random strangers on the street. or if they do, it's just a one-off; you'll probably never see that person again. in the suburbs, if you spend a lot of time on your porch, you'll probably get to know the neighbors that hang out on their porches. there's a pretty similar dynamic on the stoops of residential blocks in a city.
if I had to make a general rule, I'd say there are more people who could potentially be your friend in a city, but the barrier to becoming friends with each one is higher. you bump in to more people, but less frequently.
I hate suburbs. I’m American. Anyway First of all, most people simply like what they know and think is expected and do not bother thinking about the unknown or trying different lifestyles, I.e. suburbs. People settle into their lifestyle no matter how bad or good it is and do not question it, whether it’s their suburban environment or food habits or child easing or whatever. Pointing to something that is the current standard and saying people like it, that’s why it’s the standard is naive.
What is not to like about affordable housing and good schools? I think there is too much emphasis in these discussions on 99%-invisible style urban design and not enough on the simple socio-economic calculus the average homeowner does when deciding where to live.
It doesn't matter how walkable your neighborhood is, how broad the restaurant selection, how ethnically diverse the community, or how many different forms of public transportation there are, if the perception is that housing is expensive and schools are bad, many people are not going to move in, even if they would otherwise enjoy those amenities.
Until urban areas can meaningfully compete on those two metrics for the average person in the U.S., the suburbs are here to stay.
And you see this broadly in where people choose to live.
It's a stereotype, which is no less true for that, that young college-educated people have been tending to move into cities especially over the last 25 years and then move out to a suburb when they get married and have kids. And really it's been going on longer than that. A bunch of people I went to grad school with went to work in Manhattan in finance and lived there. Maybe one or two of them still do.
The suburbs are hell if you are young and don't have a car, don't have friends, etc. If you are a bit older you might like the square footage and relative quiet of the suburbs.
are good reflections on American Vernacular architecture; that first book in particular has a collection of comments from clients such as "if I wanted this I wouldn't have hired an architect".
Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want and the suburbs provide that in the form of a market, but the market is set very much by government standards for what kind of house is mortagable, zoning laws, etc.
In the US "suburb" can mean different things. On one hand I think of the area in Santa Monica around the Mormon temple which is all beautiful small single family homes on spectacularly landscaped tiny lots. On the other I think of the diabolical geometry of Southern New Hampshire (where I grew up) where low-density subdivisions were organized around the highways like the way your lungs are organized but when your car reaches the highway it is like a demolition derby without a clear hierarchy because those subdivisions put induced demand on the highway (simply because it is efficient for motorists to live close to the highway;) no wonder people in NH just legalized flying cars!
>Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want
I like a lot of Jacobs' ideas. I'm also somewhat amused when a lot of people (not saying you) praise her because she fought back against NYC highway plans. But the fact that she liked cities to develop along the lines of what the community wants sounds a lot like NIMBYism which many of the same people oppose as well.
> What most academics and others like them tend to miss about the American suburbs, is that most Americans like their suburbs.
Is income taken into account?
> Like published happiness research, the State of the City survey shows that reported satisfaction is highly correlated with income. Some 88 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 said their community was excellent or good; only 66 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said the same. It’s worth noting here that the impact of income is larger than the impact of location in influencing satisfaction (a 9 percent difference between city and suburb as opposed to a 22 percent difference between high and low-income groups. These data suggest that the real headline finding of this survey should be “higher income people are more satisfied with the places they live.”
> what me and perhaps many other Europeans think about the American suburb is simply not apparent to a lot of Americans.
I share this sentiment a lot. Especially given my 30+ years growing up and living in Italy, and 8+ years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I liked how this article provided clear examples of what's different, and what's important, about a city.
A great book I'd recommend is Happy City, by Charles Montgomery. [0] It will most likely change your perspective on how a city should be, but often isn't.
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I won't really dispute the general point but you can certainly find small cities and suburbs that have a walkable core with residential buildings within walking distance. There are quite a few in Silicon Valley and outside Boston. Do you still need to drive a lot of places? Certainly. But the suburbs aren't all cookie cutter houses distant from strip mall retail.
“American suburbs is a study in endless repetition. Houses lined up after each other in repetitive patterns.”
There is an innuendo that this is fundamentally bad, but surely this is true of many urban environments.
Think of london for example - streets are generally rows of identical looking houses repeated, and this is true whether we’re talking about the suburbs or the fanciest parts of central london.
I think the difference being is that you don't have to get in the car just to leave it. I myself live about 5 minutes walk from a major train station in London whose trains go past my flat and it only takes me another five minutes walk in the opposite direction to find a completely different area.
Now, some of the commuter towns of London are a different story.
Edit: Making it clear I'm not using the train which I realise could be misconstrued from my previous wording. The train station was just a reference to how busy my local area can be.
> I think the difference being is that you don't have to get in the car just to leave it.
Again there is an innuendo that this is fundamental bad.
In my experience (having lived in London for decades), for most people who live within 5 minutes of a major train station, which is not most Londoners, it’s not even practical to have a car at all, and even if you do, just getting out of the city can take an hour.
London is great if you like urban environments and don’t like cars. But I don’t see why that should be a universally held preference.
I don't mean leaving the city by public transport or whatever. I mean leaving the monotony of a particular area which I thought you meant in your OP.
Streets in London typically aren't the same for literal miles, whereas they can be in the case of some American suburbs where you need a vehicle like a car to escape it.
To be clear, my reference to the train station was to indicate how busy my local area can be. But despite that, you don't have to walk very far to find somewhere a bit more tranquil.
Okay, but the person to whom you're responding is point out the value-laden, or judgement-laden sentence, and you're now changing the subject a bit.
It was assumed by the GP that houses looking similar was bad, and now it is assumed by you that said similarity extending beyond a five-minute walk + five-minute train ride is bad.
To both your point and the GP's, similarity may often be in the eye of the beholder. I live in a suburb and feel like I see quite a lot of variety on my block, and even more variety if I walk a block to the west, or two blocks to the north, where there is an apartment complex and some retail buildings. It could be that you would look at my block, or my neighborhood, and say they all look the same to you. I don't know! I've spent enough time in dense cities around the world to form the opinion that most dense city centers lack much variety on a block-by-block basis, but again, others might see it differently.
In any case, whether there is or is not visual variety is a separate issue from commutability, I think,
What might not be apparent to this author is that lots of Americans dislike American suburbs, too. At least this one does. I also had a hard time telling the photos from Norway from places I've seen in the United States. It's quite large and diverse, unlike those suburbs!
> Norway is approximately 323,802 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km, making United States 2,937% larger than Norway.
There is, of course no doubt that the automobile enabled lifestyle is predominant here. And I also don't have any expectation of anyone emigrating from Norway to move to a boring American suburb! But if they wanted scenes like those photos from Oslo, there are places in America that look like that.
Of course, the author and I probably share some of the same feelings - we do not think our country is perfect, but we do hope to see the good things our country has, and perhaps feel some draw to defend what people think of our country when the merits are questioned!
We have exactly the kind of suburbs he’s describing. See Franklin, TN or even Palo Alto. The problem is that it’s ludicrously expense to live close enough to all the action. My guess is far more expensive than Nordic countries.
It varies. There are smaller cities that are quite nice and not too expensive in the Southeast for example. What you don't have is much of the way of public transit.
However, in general, living near the center of a walkable small city or town is probably going to cost you more than a cookie-cutter suburb a bit more off the beaten track. (And once you get ex-urban or rural, there's usually a town center but probably not much in the way of commerce there.) The suburbs like this around Boston that pop to mind are relatively expensive.
There are many comments claiming that "walkable" neighborhoods are better for everyone which is why mixed-use neighborhoods should make the most sense.
But with southern hot cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, etc, walking anywhere outside for more than 10 minutes will leave you a dripping sweaty mess. I think this is why the USA doesn't see a tidal wave of walkable neighborhoods. Thus, suburbs requiring cars (with air conditioning) still rule. Even in Florida retirement communities where there's a "planned" walkable neighborhood with a nearby fitness center and small grocery store, most use motorized golf carts instead of walking. Unlike coastal cities with ocean breezes like San Francisco, walking is very uncomfortable in many places.
Another issue with grid street neighborhoods is that many don't like thru traffic and noise. Thus the dead-end cul-de-sacs that many academics hate are loved by residents who prefer the reduced car noise and extra privacy.
American suburbs is one of those topics where mainstream media misleads their readers. If you only read from New York Times, New Yorker, or even the topmost upvoted threads on HN, you'd miss out on the "dark matter" of residents who genuinely prefer American style suburbs.
[EDIT] : I want to add some more comments for those think many Americans are unaware of the advantages of dense living and their choice of suburbia is from ignorance. The counterpoint to that is many Americans follow this life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc.
- retired and kids are grown leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move to a city condo and walk to museums again.
My point is that many people who live in suburbs are quite informed by real life experience to the advantages of "walkable cities" but the still prefer suburbs for its advantages as well. This aspect is underreported by the mainstream media.
I'd love to live downtown and have access to so much.
At the same time my suburban street is pretty isolated and quiet, and I can just send my kids outside to do whatever unsupervised without a second thought ... there's a bunch of fairly wild reserved area bordering and near my house....
I see it as a tradeoff and I'm not sure I'd make that trade for the city right now.
It's fine to walk in a nice tree-lined neighborhood, even in the peak of summer. Walking out in the sun, where there's concrete and asphalt everywhere, that's a big difference.
> genuinely prefer American style suburbs
From among the options they're aware of. That's a confounder that's hard to control for.
I don't know how many Americans have lived only in suburbs. Between being a kid, a student, a young carefree professional and a parent I've lived in any combination of big, small, cheap, expensive, old, new, busy, quiet neighborhoods.
Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect. When I'm an empty-nester I might go somewhere else, but I'm not here because I'm unaware of other options.
> Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect.
In the time of Covid-19? I agree. Before February 2020? Hell, no. I moved to the 'burbs to a 4-bedroom house from my 2-bedroom city apartment. I'll move back when I can dine at bars and restaurants safely again.
I'm only here for the schools. We'd prefer the close-to-the-city old suburbs (on entirely grid-layout streets, easy walk to various stores and entertainment, parks galore), country living, or the city proper, in roughly that order. The twisty-street burbs with nothing walkable is our last choice. Except it's the only thing available where the good (public) schools are.
This a good comment. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. I then lived in London, spent time in Berlin & L'viv.
I can tell you my preference is not London. It's loud, even when it's not. It's dirty. And wow is it busy.
I think Berlin does a nice job blending big city, with accessibility and quality of life.
Ultimately without a European visa though I'm back in the American suburbs which I enjoy. I like the fact that it's quiet, private, and I have yard and the space to entertain friends and family.
One of the big benefits of typical subdivisions is that you DON'T have commercial properties within them. Yes you can find them on the street outside the community but that is the point.
Its homes and at most some amenities that are clearly for the community and not commercial. There is actually a good number of people who don't want the pools, tennis courts, and such, that some larger subdivisions have.
Fortunately in my state its been law for decades all streets have to have a side walk on one side and this makes getting around really simple.
Really comes down to that divide, between home, shopping, and work. A person's home is their castle and their subdivision their country. The barbarians are at the gate
I’m in my first suburb and house since I became independent. I really like the walking trails and the athletic facilities it’s a great way to meet neighbors that isn’t awkward.
There are plenty of walkable cities in hot climates all over the world. Look at South America or Asia. After wearing appropriate clothing--loose open-weave linen, shorts, etc., not dense cotton t-shirts and tight baseball caps--and spending significant time outside, one can grow accustomed to the heat.
In many countries in Central and South American it's common for men to wear pants and even suits in 80+ weather and nobody's complaining--because they've grown accustomed to the heat after being outside all day. Go to Hong Kong or Singapore or Japan in the summer where it's stifling outdoors and men are wearing full suits as they walk about their day. I'm not saying we have to wear full suits in Florida--I'm just saying that one grows accustomed to one's environment.
Americans feel they deserve to wear in Florida whatever they were wearing in Chicago; and then since most of their day is spent transitioning from one from freezing-cold refrigerated space to another to freezing-cold refrigerated space, with only brief flashes outdoors as they walk from their car to their shopping mall, they never get the chance to accustom themselves to their environment. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Another issue with grid street neighborhoods is that many don't like thru traffic and noise. Thus the dead-end cul-de-sacs that many academics hate are loved by residents who prefer the reduced car noise and extra privacy.
Those cul-de-sacs funnel all the traffic onto feeder streets, and of course all of the services are on the feeder streets. So while the dead ends and crescents are quiet, I don't walk there, I walk to the services and have to put up with much more traffic and noise than I would in a grid setup.
I'm an architect / urban planner who used to live in Phoenix (Tempe, actually). There's absolutely no reason a city in that kind of environment can't be walkable, even in the height of summer. There are two key components:
First, you don't just need mixed-use, but density of mixed-use. This is why London, where I now live, is walkable. There's a good cafe within 2 minutes of my doorstep. A doctor's office and a grocery store and a bakery within 3 minutes. A park and a pub and several more shops within 4 minutes. A hardware store within 5 minutes. I very rarely am required to walk for as long as 10 minutes. Even in an environment like Phoenix, these distances would be perfectly walkable. I've also spent time in Reykjavik in January, and found it quite walkable for exactly the same reason. This has nothing at all to do with climate.
Second, what does have to do with climate is shade. Currently, cities like Phoenix are actually much hotter than the surrounding desert, due to the "urban heat island" effect. This is primarily driven by the abundance of asphalt and other high-thermal-mass, low-albedo surfaces. But cities don't need to be designed this way. If you look at traditional Middle eastern urban design, you can find cities that actually create "urban cool islands", and are (relatively) livable without air conditioning. Key components of these techniques are:
- Very narrow roads / alleys, such that buildings are continuously shading each other and sunlight doesn't reach the ground
- roofs painted white to reflect the sunlight & heat back into space
- "cold sinks" to capture cool night air
- Wind catchers and various other devices to funnel prevailing winds into the alleyways, and to convert thermal updrafts into air movement even when there aren't winds, creating siphons to circulate air out of the cold sinks
- courtyards with pools and vegetation to create evaporative cooling from the moving air.
These techniques and others have been well-understood for several thousand years. They're detailed in a lovely book by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, called "Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture". Highly recommended.
However, all of the above is incompatible with low-density development and streets that can carry large amounts of vehicles. The former precludes the necessary density of services, and the latter precludes any of the environmental adaptations that are necessary to make the desert livable. But these are man-made planning choices, not dictates of the environment. Those choices can be un-made.
I grew up in Atlanta and lived there for 40 years. You're full of shit.
People love going outside and there are outdoor events year round. The beltline has been expanding around the city since the Olympics in the late 90s. Old neighborhoods like the Lindbergh, Edgewood, Inman Park, Kirkwood, and Avondale are all perfectly walkable with their overgrowth of trees. Even Atlantic Station, which is completely devoid of trees and lacking any soul, is tolerable due to the long shadows cast by the buildings.
Yes the heat and humidity can be unrelenting when you're going from your cozy AC'd house to the mailbox across a stark white heat mirror of a driveway flanking a treeless yard, but that's a product of suburban design esthetic.
Older communities in the city are downright pleasant, it's only the newer suburban neighborhoods with expansive treeless yards where being outdoors is intolerable.
> Yes the heat and humidity can be unrelenting when you're going from your cozy AC'd house to the mailbox across a stark white heat mirror of a driveway flanking a treeless yard, but that's a product of suburban design esthetic.
I think this hits the nail on the head, many people don't acclimatize because they live in their own artificial climate where they leave an air conditioned home, get in an air conditioned car to go to an air conditioned workplace. I grew up in areas comparable to the one's GP listed long before air conditioning was common and walking places was normal.
Most of the Middle East, Africa, southeast Asia, and India have hotter temperatures and yet still manage to have old-style walkable cities. A lot of the architecture is designed to minimize heat and trap cold air. See riads in Morocco, for instance.
The truth is that Americans are just a bit lazy. (I am American, so this is self-criticism.)
Your average commuter has no input on city design or the minutiae of the cost/profit ratios involved in building the city. The blame should instead lay with those who incentivize profit over city improvement.
America largely identifies itself as a capitalist country. Our defeat of "communism" and its replacement with "capitalism" is something America is still quite proud of - even here on HN.
Relevant to this problem (walkable cities and the motivations to or not to create them), capitalism and profit as a motivation for everything go pretty much hand-in-hand.
Well, if I borrow from Wikipedia (and the definition is heavily attributed), it's more the private ownership of the means of production, and the operation of that means for profit. Blind worship, no. But profit is definitely bundled into the concept of capitalism.
And corporations throughout America are definitely leaning into the "profit at any cost" and "shareholder value at any cost" mantras.
EDIT: Disliking something doesn't make it go away, folks.
A better comparison to the hot and humid gulf coast than Mediterranean climates is Singapore, which benefits from density as a matter of necessity, and tons of air conditioning.
National slur? That's a pretty big accusation. It was a half-joking, self-depreciating comment. Sheesh. I know you're a reasonable guy, dang, but I really don't appreciate my comment being labeled that way.
It just means a disparaging remark or a slight. I don't care about the noun, so if you want to suggest a more accurate one I'm happy to edit my comment above. What I care about is that you (or anyone) not post putdowns like that, because it leads at best to crappier discussion and at worst to hellish flamewar. Being a member of the disparaged group doesn't help, at least not on the internet, where such nuances get lost immediately.
Re "half-joking, self-depreciating", I believe you, but such things don't communicate themselves, as this thread already demonstrates. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Slur always meant a pretty offensive remark to me, typically referring to a race or ethnic group.
If a news headline said, "Mr. Smith Uses Slur Against [Group] on Live Television", I would assume it was a racist remark. Which is, of course, a pretty serious thing. Mr. Smith would likely lose his job and his reputation, purely based on the inclusion of the word slur in the headline.
Putdown or disparaging remark seems like a better word to describe it.
I just use 'slur' in the dictionary sense: "a disparaging remark or a slight" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slur). But ok, I've replaced it with 'putdown' in my GP comment.
There's a pretty wide variation in how these words get understood across different parts of the world.
If an American developer wanted to, can they mix commercial zones into suburbs/residential zones? Can you put a shop every 10 houses? I'm honestly not even sure how this works legally. Because you never see it. It's a grid of neighborhoods with strips of shops along the biggest connecting roads.
there's not much you can say about zoning in america as a whole. every locality has its own set of complicated rules. some places make a hard distinction between residential (and even types of homes) and commercial zones. some allow certain types of businesses in an otherwise residential area. some are actually pretty lax about zoning.
You can't really put all American suburbs in a single category. We moved from one suburb to another a few years ago. The first involved a 60-120min commute each way, no matter if you drove, used the commuter boat, or train, and required a car for everything. The suburb we moved to is a 5 mile drive or bike on separated path, I can bike to stores, bike to school with the kids to school then continue on to work, etc.
We have half the land we used to, and our neighborhood probably looks more like the American suburb satellite view in the parent article, but having bike/pedestrian infrastructure, and proximity to the things that we want to do makes a big difference.
Amen! That's why I love living in Portland. Most areas of Portland, and even some of the surrounding towns, look far more like those images of Norway then the American examples. I came here specifically to escape the soul-crushing car-focused culturelessness of the suburbia I grew up in. Happy to wake up here every day!
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThe American suburbs are the Toyota Camry of housing. Kind of boring and somewhat ugly, but affordable, functional, and ultimately well-liked by the end-user.
Anecdotally, I met thousands of Americans in my life, and I'd say the vast majority of them never cease to praise the life and balance of small European cities.
So it seems to be more structural due to government. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I like having a big yard with dogs and a cul-de-sac for my kids to play in.
The affordability aspect is also subsidized by green house gas emissions, and cheap oil.
Don’t assume because other people choose something different than you that they must be ignorant to the other options. It just different. Not wrong.
Also, suburbs are only affordable because we continue to defer infrastructure maintenance. At some point, we will have to pay to maintain all the bridges, roads, etc.
I'm not anti-suburb necessarily. But, I do loathe the car-based culture we've created. And the rage that any mention of alternative transport seems to elicit among many suburb dwellers (who also love to bitch about traffic problems, but only want more tarmac as a solution).
Local example: I live in Reston VA. We've slowly been adding bike lanes to existing roads as other improvements are made. In some cases, this required cutting from 2 lanes to 1 lane. However, in all cases, traffic timings and accident analysis was undertaken and in all cases that I've seen, traffic flow either improved or if there was a decrease, it was on the order of 1-2 seconds per mile traveled. Additionally, in most cases, traffic accidents of all kinds were reduced.
But, you wouldn't know it from listening to the anti-bike crowd. They see the reduction in lane count and immediately jump to "nobody rides bikes!", "run them over" or worse. Seriously, it's that bad.
I'll also add that in some places, the bike lanes are rarely used, but that's as as direct result of poor designs created to silence the noisy motorists. Another local example - the main thoroughfare along my neighborhood has bike lanes. However, the lanes stop just prior to the two places you would want to ride your bike - the high school and the shopping center. So, of course fewer people use the lanes - they don't actually GO anywhere! It's infuriating.
Edit - the sidewalks along this same thoroughfare also start/stop or switch sides. This makes it less tenable to walk to the school or shopping (the road is about 2 miles end-to-end; shopping center at one end, high school near mid-point). Lots of people are within 1 mile of either destination, but running back and forth across a 45mph busy road is simply unsafe. A pedestrian was killed a year ago running from the sidewalk on one side to his home on the other. How the heck is this even to code? Argh.
City planners and bicycle activists need to work with human nature, not against it.
Even myself - I couldn't wait to be able to drive to high school, nevermind the bus, my bicycle, carpooling with neighbors, etc.
The urban planner who decided to drop a major employment center inside the triangle made by 3 massive highways (with little/no housing, no transit access, and ridiculous street layout) needs a kick in the crotch.
In my experience what "first we make car transport less and less appealing" translates to is "we should allocate some of this land dedicated to free parking for other uses."
Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking. But suburbanites insist that city-dwellers should shoulder the opportunity cost of making their wasteful transportation choices more convenient for them.
I live on the edge of a city. Most of my shopping is out in the suburbs as they crush the city core on convenience of time and transport (and often on price due to overhead).
With proper ventilation, subterranean roads and parking areas could enable this where geology is favorable, but it wouldn't be cheap.
Part of it is economics - proximity to the metro made the land more valuable. But part was the county BOD and planning commissions putting their foot down and making changes to zoning (changes to min parking requirements, changes to housing density, etc).
As somebody who lives across the street from the edge of one of these zones, it's a mixed bag. I get to walk to work. Next year, there will be a new grocer on my way. Pretty good. The downside is more traffic, especially on bridges across the airport access road (we really need 4-5 instead of the 3 that exist today). And, as land values have gone up, developers are trying their hardest to buy up parkland and convert it to condos/offices.
San Francisco is almost a credible example. Pre-Covid, it was quite common to want to go from point A near Market Street to point B, 1-2 miles away, also near Market street. This could easily take 45 minutes by car or 5-10 min by bike. If the BART or Muni went to the right place, you had a Clipper card so you didn’t need to navigate the atrocious payment system, and you didn’t need to use the elevator, it was reasonably fast. If the Market street improvements had gone quickly to every-five-minute bus service with a dedicated lane, the bus would have been a huge win over car/rideshare.
A lot of transit planners seem to fail to understand that good transit will be widely used even by affluent people as long as they trust that the transit is frequent (or runs on a real schedule and the schedule is accessible), has appropriate hours, and is clean and safe. Instead there are pilot programs with 1/4 the service, and they fail to attract 1/4 of the riders, because 1/4 of the service is simply not a good alternative to a car.
It’s like the Caltrain wondering why the tech employee ridership isn’t great when the express service stops before all the programmers go to work. Or Sonic.net deciding to put fiber in the neighborhoods that already have a lot of customers of their DSL service.
1. You have a yard for you and your kids to play in. I know a number of people who love this. You can send the kids out to the yard without having to be there with them. When the weather is nice you can do this most days. And, the kids can have a blast doing it.
2. You can grow a garden. Flower garden or vegetable garden... I know a number of people who do this. This brings them pleasure in multiple forms.
3. It's a place that's yours rather than someone else's. When you rent there is someone else that owns it and you live there. Some people like to own and have more control over their space. It's about agency.
Like I said, I'm not anti-suburb. I am anti-car-dependent development planning.
Which in turn means someone of median (or even 75th percentile) income who wants to buy a house with a yard big enough for kids to meaningfully play in isn't going to do so in Cambridge, but can readily do it in a number of suburbs within an hour's commuting distance of Cambridge/Boston.
* - or rather the bank owns more of it than we do and we’re slowly buying it from them...
I see no reason why. Cambridge was, once upon a time, a streetcar suburb of Boston. There's no reason you can't just build more dense suburbs and outlying cities. You just don't need them to be car-dependent. There are tons of suburbs outside of major European cities that are just less dense and more family oriented while still being well served by transit and being walkable for all peoples' daily needs.
There's also no reason all the land has to be personal and private. Condo buildings can have yards and gardens. Kids also do fine playing in public parks, rec centers, and playgrounds. There's a variety of built environments that serve families' needs that we simply do not build because of zoning restrictions. Singapore manages to build extremely densely, keep housing costs accessible to median income families, and still have their kids grow up happy and well adjusted. It's a policy choice America makes to be this wasteful and it's mostly done by making it illegal to build any other way.
Some of the benefits: During COVID, we put up a trampoline for the kids to play on and get some exercise. Private yard meant we didn’t have to ask or fight anyone about it and there’s no additional COVID risk because everyone already lives together.
We put up a vegetable garden as well; no one is bothered by it.
Plenty of people want to (or are okay with) live in high-density housing in an urban environment. Not everyone does; as you say, there’s no reason everything has to be one or the other.
Unless you have building codes that encourages the same type of domiciles as 'the city'. The Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto used to be a suburb of "the city", but now it is in the city, and the houses have big lots, lanes/garages, and plenty of square footage:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/200+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
They're expensive now because urban living is cool again, but up until the late-1990s/early-2000s, land was not that expensive "in the city": urban living was generally considered only for immigrants, and the WASPs lived out in the 'burbs.
For some stuff that's a little less palatial, just go up the street for some good examples:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
There's no technical reason why areas/neighbourhoods couldn't be built like that again.
At what multiple of price?
Many Americans do have real-life experience of living in dense cities but still prefer suburbs because of their stage in life. A copy & paste of another comment outlining common multi-decade life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc. Yes this means the proverbial "soccer mom" with a SUV to drive the kids to sports practice, ballet lessons, etc
- retired and kids are grown and gone leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move back to a city condo and enjoy walking to museums again
So the suburbs are attracting the knowledgeable former city dwellers. Yes, lower land cost (and hence cheaper sq ft) is definitely part of it but not the only advantage. Some do like the quieter streets, a garage to pursue hobbies, a yard for barbeques, less crime, etc.
Nothing wrong with saying that, but it's a loose characterization based strictly on opinion.
There's real and tangible problems with urban/sub-urban planning in the USA that go far deeper than whether someone "likes" something. It deserves exploration and critique. It's not merely a consumer choice.
You're surrounded by people, but miss out on a lot of the small interactions that come from being close together. You're dependent on a car, so regularly stuck in traffic and can't go anywhere on your own. The boring/ugly aspects might be uninspiring. All fo this is "normal" so you don't notice it in your day to day life, but it adds up.
I'm probably completely wrong here, but when I see the massive mental health and drug issues from otherwise rich, stable, suburban families I wonder if there's a connection.
I have lived in suburbs, dense city and rural countryside. The density has no say on the quality of your neighbors or the extent to which you will interact with them.
In fact, if my anecdotal experience were made a rule, it would be "the more densely you pack people together the less they function as a community". Of course it isnt true as a rule, but it has been my personal experience.
if I had to make a general rule, I'd say there are more people who could potentially be your friend in a city, but the barrier to becoming friends with each one is higher. you bump in to more people, but less frequently.
It doesn't matter how walkable your neighborhood is, how broad the restaurant selection, how ethnically diverse the community, or how many different forms of public transportation there are, if the perception is that housing is expensive and schools are bad, many people are not going to move in, even if they would otherwise enjoy those amenities.
Until urban areas can meaningfully compete on those two metrics for the average person in the U.S., the suburbs are here to stay.
It's a stereotype, which is no less true for that, that young college-educated people have been tending to move into cities especially over the last 25 years and then move out to a suburb when they get married and have kids. And really it's been going on longer than that. A bunch of people I went to grad school with went to work in Manhattan in finance and lived there. Maybe one or two of them still do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU
The suburbs are hell if you are young and don't have a car, don't have friends, etc. If you are a bit older you might like the square footage and relative quiet of the suburbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas
are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
are good reflections on American Vernacular architecture; that first book in particular has a collection of comments from clients such as "if I wanted this I wouldn't have hired an architect".
Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want and the suburbs provide that in the form of a market, but the market is set very much by government standards for what kind of house is mortagable, zoning laws, etc.
In the US "suburb" can mean different things. On one hand I think of the area in Santa Monica around the Mormon temple which is all beautiful small single family homes on spectacularly landscaped tiny lots. On the other I think of the diabolical geometry of Southern New Hampshire (where I grew up) where low-density subdivisions were organized around the highways like the way your lungs are organized but when your car reaches the highway it is like a demolition derby without a clear hierarchy because those subdivisions put induced demand on the highway (simply because it is efficient for motorists to live close to the highway;) no wonder people in NH just legalized flying cars!
I like a lot of Jacobs' ideas. I'm also somewhat amused when a lot of people (not saying you) praise her because she fought back against NYC highway plans. But the fact that she liked cities to develop along the lines of what the community wants sounds a lot like NIMBYism which many of the same people oppose as well.
Is income taken into account?
> Like published happiness research, the State of the City survey shows that reported satisfaction is highly correlated with income. Some 88 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 said their community was excellent or good; only 66 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said the same. It’s worth noting here that the impact of income is larger than the impact of location in influencing satisfaction (a 9 percent difference between city and suburb as opposed to a 22 percent difference between high and low-income groups. These data suggest that the real headline finding of this survey should be “higher income people are more satisfied with the places they live.”
* https://cityobservatory.org/are-suburbs-really-happier/
Survey in question:
* http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/overall-americans-in...
I share this sentiment a lot. Especially given my 30+ years growing up and living in Italy, and 8+ years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I liked how this article provided clear examples of what's different, and what's important, about a city.
A great book I'd recommend is Happy City, by Charles Montgomery. [0] It will most likely change your perspective on how a city should be, but often isn't.
[0]: https://thehappycity.com/the-book/
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Maybe he should have used a map that indicates parks.
Weird.
There is an innuendo that this is fundamentally bad, but surely this is true of many urban environments.
Think of london for example - streets are generally rows of identical looking houses repeated, and this is true whether we’re talking about the suburbs or the fanciest parts of central london.
Now, some of the commuter towns of London are a different story.
Edit: Making it clear I'm not using the train which I realise could be misconstrued from my previous wording. The train station was just a reference to how busy my local area can be.
Again there is an innuendo that this is fundamental bad.
In my experience (having lived in London for decades), for most people who live within 5 minutes of a major train station, which is not most Londoners, it’s not even practical to have a car at all, and even if you do, just getting out of the city can take an hour.
London is great if you like urban environments and don’t like cars. But I don’t see why that should be a universally held preference.
Streets in London typically aren't the same for literal miles, whereas they can be in the case of some American suburbs where you need a vehicle like a car to escape it.
To be clear, my reference to the train station was to indicate how busy my local area can be. But despite that, you don't have to walk very far to find somewhere a bit more tranquil.
Is this meaningfully true? South london for example has enormous areas with architecture that is just as ‘the same’ as American suburbs.
It’s definitely true that American suburbs are lower density and the houses are typically larger, but again that seems like just a preference.
It was assumed by the GP that houses looking similar was bad, and now it is assumed by you that said similarity extending beyond a five-minute walk + five-minute train ride is bad.
To both your point and the GP's, similarity may often be in the eye of the beholder. I live in a suburb and feel like I see quite a lot of variety on my block, and even more variety if I walk a block to the west, or two blocks to the north, where there is an apartment complex and some retail buildings. It could be that you would look at my block, or my neighborhood, and say they all look the same to you. I don't know! I've spent enough time in dense cities around the world to form the opinion that most dense city centers lack much variety on a block-by-block basis, but again, others might see it differently.
In any case, whether there is or is not visual variety is a separate issue from commutability, I think,
> Norway is approximately 323,802 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km, making United States 2,937% larger than Norway.
There is, of course no doubt that the automobile enabled lifestyle is predominant here. And I also don't have any expectation of anyone emigrating from Norway to move to a boring American suburb! But if they wanted scenes like those photos from Oslo, there are places in America that look like that.
Of course, the author and I probably share some of the same feelings - we do not think our country is perfect, but we do hope to see the good things our country has, and perhaps feel some draw to defend what people think of our country when the merits are questioned!
However, in general, living near the center of a walkable small city or town is probably going to cost you more than a cookie-cutter suburb a bit more off the beaten track. (And once you get ex-urban or rural, there's usually a town center but probably not much in the way of commerce there.) The suburbs like this around Boston that pop to mind are relatively expensive.
But with southern hot cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, etc, walking anywhere outside for more than 10 minutes will leave you a dripping sweaty mess. I think this is why the USA doesn't see a tidal wave of walkable neighborhoods. Thus, suburbs requiring cars (with air conditioning) still rule. Even in Florida retirement communities where there's a "planned" walkable neighborhood with a nearby fitness center and small grocery store, most use motorized golf carts instead of walking. Unlike coastal cities with ocean breezes like San Francisco, walking is very uncomfortable in many places.
Another issue with grid street neighborhoods is that many don't like thru traffic and noise. Thus the dead-end cul-de-sacs that many academics hate are loved by residents who prefer the reduced car noise and extra privacy.
American suburbs is one of those topics where mainstream media misleads their readers. If you only read from New York Times, New Yorker, or even the topmost upvoted threads on HN, you'd miss out on the "dark matter" of residents who genuinely prefer American style suburbs.
[EDIT] : I want to add some more comments for those think many Americans are unaware of the advantages of dense living and their choice of suburbia is from ignorance. The counterpoint to that is many Americans follow this life timeline:
- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things
- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc.
- retired and kids are grown leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move to a city condo and walk to museums again.
My point is that many people who live in suburbs are quite informed by real life experience to the advantages of "walkable cities" but the still prefer suburbs for its advantages as well. This aspect is underreported by the mainstream media.
At the same time my suburban street is pretty isolated and quiet, and I can just send my kids outside to do whatever unsupervised without a second thought ... there's a bunch of fairly wild reserved area bordering and near my house....
I see it as a tradeoff and I'm not sure I'd make that trade for the city right now.
It's fine to walk in a nice tree-lined neighborhood, even in the peak of summer. Walking out in the sun, where there's concrete and asphalt everywhere, that's a big difference.
> genuinely prefer American style suburbs
From among the options they're aware of. That's a confounder that's hard to control for.
Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect. When I'm an empty-nester I might go somewhere else, but I'm not here because I'm unaware of other options.
Only about a third of Americans older than 25 have finished college. Not long ago, that figure was more like 1 in 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
> Right now my "American style" suburban house is perfect.
In the time of Covid-19? I agree. Before February 2020? Hell, no. I moved to the 'burbs to a 4-bedroom house from my 2-bedroom city apartment. I'll move back when I can dine at bars and restaurants safely again.
I can tell you my preference is not London. It's loud, even when it's not. It's dirty. And wow is it busy.
I think Berlin does a nice job blending big city, with accessibility and quality of life.
Ultimately without a European visa though I'm back in the American suburbs which I enjoy. I like the fact that it's quiet, private, and I have yard and the space to entertain friends and family.
Its homes and at most some amenities that are clearly for the community and not commercial. There is actually a good number of people who don't want the pools, tennis courts, and such, that some larger subdivisions have.
Fortunately in my state its been law for decades all streets have to have a side walk on one side and this makes getting around really simple.
Really comes down to that divide, between home, shopping, and work. A person's home is their castle and their subdivision their country. The barbarians are at the gate
In many countries in Central and South American it's common for men to wear pants and even suits in 80+ weather and nobody's complaining--because they've grown accustomed to the heat after being outside all day. Go to Hong Kong or Singapore or Japan in the summer where it's stifling outdoors and men are wearing full suits as they walk about their day. I'm not saying we have to wear full suits in Florida--I'm just saying that one grows accustomed to one's environment.
Americans feel they deserve to wear in Florida whatever they were wearing in Chicago; and then since most of their day is spent transitioning from one from freezing-cold refrigerated space to another to freezing-cold refrigerated space, with only brief flashes outdoors as they walk from their car to their shopping mall, they never get the chance to accustom themselves to their environment. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Those cul-de-sacs funnel all the traffic onto feeder streets, and of course all of the services are on the feeder streets. So while the dead ends and crescents are quiet, I don't walk there, I walk to the services and have to put up with much more traffic and noise than I would in a grid setup.
First, you don't just need mixed-use, but density of mixed-use. This is why London, where I now live, is walkable. There's a good cafe within 2 minutes of my doorstep. A doctor's office and a grocery store and a bakery within 3 minutes. A park and a pub and several more shops within 4 minutes. A hardware store within 5 minutes. I very rarely am required to walk for as long as 10 minutes. Even in an environment like Phoenix, these distances would be perfectly walkable. I've also spent time in Reykjavik in January, and found it quite walkable for exactly the same reason. This has nothing at all to do with climate.
Second, what does have to do with climate is shade. Currently, cities like Phoenix are actually much hotter than the surrounding desert, due to the "urban heat island" effect. This is primarily driven by the abundance of asphalt and other high-thermal-mass, low-albedo surfaces. But cities don't need to be designed this way. If you look at traditional Middle eastern urban design, you can find cities that actually create "urban cool islands", and are (relatively) livable without air conditioning. Key components of these techniques are:
- Very narrow roads / alleys, such that buildings are continuously shading each other and sunlight doesn't reach the ground
- roofs painted white to reflect the sunlight & heat back into space
- "cold sinks" to capture cool night air
- Wind catchers and various other devices to funnel prevailing winds into the alleyways, and to convert thermal updrafts into air movement even when there aren't winds, creating siphons to circulate air out of the cold sinks
- courtyards with pools and vegetation to create evaporative cooling from the moving air.
These techniques and others have been well-understood for several thousand years. They're detailed in a lovely book by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, called "Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture". Highly recommended.
However, all of the above is incompatible with low-density development and streets that can carry large amounts of vehicles. The former precludes the necessary density of services, and the latter precludes any of the environmental adaptations that are necessary to make the desert livable. But these are man-made planning choices, not dictates of the environment. Those choices can be un-made.
I grew up in Atlanta and lived there for 40 years. You're full of shit.
People love going outside and there are outdoor events year round. The beltline has been expanding around the city since the Olympics in the late 90s. Old neighborhoods like the Lindbergh, Edgewood, Inman Park, Kirkwood, and Avondale are all perfectly walkable with their overgrowth of trees. Even Atlantic Station, which is completely devoid of trees and lacking any soul, is tolerable due to the long shadows cast by the buildings.
Yes the heat and humidity can be unrelenting when you're going from your cozy AC'd house to the mailbox across a stark white heat mirror of a driveway flanking a treeless yard, but that's a product of suburban design esthetic.
Older communities in the city are downright pleasant, it's only the newer suburban neighborhoods with expansive treeless yards where being outdoors is intolerable.
I think this hits the nail on the head, many people don't acclimatize because they live in their own artificial climate where they leave an air conditioned home, get in an air conditioned car to go to an air conditioned workplace. I grew up in areas comparable to the one's GP listed long before air conditioning was common and walking places was normal.
The truth is that Americans are just a bit lazy. (I am American, so this is self-criticism.)
Seems like a bit of a stretch. Especially since your argument includes things like building architecture.
It's more likely that it's less profitable to create such architecture, naturally discouraging the creating of walkable cities in the summer months.
It's worth remembering that unless it's required by code, it's usually not done when it comes to many professional builders.
Relevant to this problem (walkable cities and the motivations to or not to create them), capitalism and profit as a motivation for everything go pretty much hand-in-hand.
And corporations throughout America are definitely leaning into the "profit at any cost" and "shareholder value at any cost" mantras.
EDIT: Disliking something doesn't make it go away, folks.
A better comparison to the hot and humid gulf coast than Mediterranean climates is Singapore, which benefits from density as a matter of necessity, and tons of air conditioning.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556184.
In any case, message received.
Re "half-joking, self-depreciating", I believe you, but such things don't communicate themselves, as this thread already demonstrates. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If a news headline said, "Mr. Smith Uses Slur Against [Group] on Live Television", I would assume it was a racist remark. Which is, of course, a pretty serious thing. Mr. Smith would likely lose his job and his reputation, purely based on the inclusion of the word slur in the headline.
Putdown or disparaging remark seems like a better word to describe it.
There's a pretty wide variation in how these words get understood across different parts of the world.
We have half the land we used to, and our neighborhood probably looks more like the American suburb satellite view in the parent article, but having bike/pedestrian infrastructure, and proximity to the things that we want to do makes a big difference.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ