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Comment by pionar | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together.

Oh, I see it. I see "giving up" crowded, noisy urban areas while walking in a crowd that will make most people feel claustrophobic. I see "giving up" fast, hurried lifestyles with dirty air and people.

I like having room to breathe. I like being able to look around for a half-mile and see a few houses. I like those long drives to get places. I like not having to wait in line with 20 other people to get a bagel. I like being able to open my window in the morning and not hearing someone else's shitty conversations.

Get off the high horse. Some of us like it out here.

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I think you are conflating New York with livable places. Which is understandable; New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US. But the same design principles work on any scale. Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable. I am certainly not suggesting that you be forced to live close to other people. But I would like to have the option. The other half of that is that since we all live a half-mile from all our neighbors, we don't know how to behave with consideration for each other. Without a culture of reciprocal consideration, there are bound to be conflicts. It is not obvious how we get from here to there.

>New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US

Anything that holds New York City--by which one presumably means parts of Manhattan and maybe hipster areas of Brooklyn--as a minimal bar would seem to be a rather demanding standard. Very few cities in the world have that kind of density.

>Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable.

At some level, this is true. I suppose by some definition, the center of my rural/exurban town is walkable. There are sidewalks, the town green/library/town hall, schools, church, some number of houses, etc. Quite pleasant. But there isn't so much as a restaurant or coffeehouse or store, so while quite pleasant, it probably doesn't fall under what the typical urbanphile would call walkable.

I live in South Beach, and while we still have a car, we only drive it a couple times per week. The gold standard is being able to walk to the grocery. If you can do that, you can walk to a lot of other things as well.

DC is another example of a very walkable city in the US. I imagine there are others among the older east coast cities as well.

>Which is understandable; New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US.

Oh come one! That's not even close to being true. I live on the west side of Los Angeles, and it's very walkable here. (I believe in those ratings sites that rate walkability from 0 to 100 Santa Monica is something like a 98, just like NYC.) I used to live in Atlanta, and even there certain parts were very walkable at the time (thinking Little 5 Points, for example). San Francisco is totally walkable. Chicago, too. I'd bet most large cities in the US are walkable. Boston was when I lived there.

Can you make a living where you're living? If so, that's awesome. Farmers obviously do that; fishermen often live in small fishing villages. Lumberjacks can live in the woods just fine. The problem is when people move to the country but still work in the city, and have to endure the traffic getting around every day.

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