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Comment by CanSpice | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit false. It assumes that the cost of living is driven solely by housing. There have been numerous studies done that show that the total cost of living doesn't change much between city and suburbs. Housing costs are higher in the city, but they're largely balanced out by lower transportation costs and house upkeep costs (apartments are cheaper to heat/cool than houses, for example).

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Here you go:

"A cheap home isn’t affordable if it comes with high transportation costs."

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/the-problem-with-how-...

My transportation costs (including the purchase price of the car, all gas and maintenance) are an order of magnitude less than the home price delta between where I currently live and where I'd have to live in order to give up my car.

This cannot be stressed enough. Too many people on HN seem baffled by car culture, or think it's some kind of conspiracy, but the answer is right here. Savings on land prices for getting far from the center are massive, the costs of manufactured goods like cars are tiny, and the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter.

Cars are part and parcel of modern life and they won't be going away any time soon, and I don't think more than a few extremists really want that anyway.

What a lot of people do is to rebalance things so we have more of a 'right tool for the job' culture in the US. Cars for some things, bikes or walking for closer trips (enabled by legalizing things like corner stores or neighborhood barbers again), public transportation for other things.

Go tell that to the 40% of New Yonkers without cars.

> the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter

The solution that urbanism offers is to stop massively subsidizing the latter. Let car culture live or die on its own merits, not because of government subsidies.

Without a corresponding subsidy to lower the cost of urban living, most people will be worse off (maybe the rich in urban centers will save more in taxes than they lose in mobility, doubtful anyone else will).

Subsidizing infrastructure that increases quality of life and lowers cost of living is kind of the point of government.

The intrinsic cost of urban living is much less than the intrinsic cost living in car focused suburbs. It is only more expensive now because of an under supply of urban areas caused by decades of subsidization of car focused suburbs. The ROI of spending on urban infrastructure is much higher than spending on car focused suburban development.

What? The rent in cities is vastly depressed by all the demand that the suburbs soak up. Limit the effective radius of the city to walking distance and it will skyrocket as the same number of people clamor to fit into less space.

Who is talking about getting rid of suburbs or limiting things to walking distance? That would be crazy.

There were suburbs before cars existed and there can be suburbs that don't require cars for every single trip. Before the widespread adoption of cars, suburbs were often served by streetcars that let people travel into the city. They also were walkable for trips within the suburb. Unlike modern suburbs, they also allowed low nuisance commercial properties to be interspersed with residential properties so that many of people's basic errands could be accomplished without traveling large distances.

> low nuisance commercial

Exactly! Things like corner stores, or neighborhood barber shops. Illegal in many suburbs of the US, these days.

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