Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirtbox | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly US-centric way of looking at it, the rest of the world really doesn't have the same problems as the US in any of these areas. I lived in Berlin for a time and many places in the UK and around Europe and really none of this applies. People live where the work is, commutes are generally under 30 minutes.

The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

View on HN

> The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else.

I think that might've been a factor, but it's an overgeneralization. In Canada, we didn't those race relations problems to anywhere close to the same degree, and yet big Canadian cities are just as sprawled as their American counterparts.

For my money, the major problem with the US and Canada is for the most part, we got to start fresh. A lot of the expansion happened in the age of the automobile, and at the time, we built what we thought we wanted — large suburbs and big arteries to take us between them. This worked pretty well in the beginning, but the further we spread, the more obvious the realization that the design doesn't scale [1].

In Europe, a lot of cities were built pre-car, and although they've seen significant change in the interim, large parts of the original geography are left over. There are some places that consciously designed their infrastructure well even if it was against the grain for the time (e.g. anti-car protests in the Netherlands that led to modern bicycle-friendly Amsterdam; also, Copenhagen), but a lot of it is a historical accident which turns out to have led to better livability than anything our city planners have done on purpose in 100 years.

---

[1] It's still not obvious to everyone, but as commute times continue to go up, I believe that broader consensus will form.

"that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs."

I'm sorry, but this is not fair.

For whatever reasons (and ironically, after major civil rights advances) - many urban areas on the US became massively violent.

Rates of violent crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's quite a radical increase. And again - note that this was a time of ostensibly major civil rights progress.

To wit - the increase in violence was not so much in rural areas, it was urban, ergo, there was even more than an 600% increase in crime. This was an era of increasing literacy and access to education for all Americans, including those who were underpriveledged. And this was way before Regans+Clinton strategy of mass incarceration.

It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - is somehow 'racist'.

If your neighbourhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else.

[1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

I don't think 'walkability' is a thing in any US city other than the one's established before cars, sadly.

On the subject of the article - if the Government is banning the sale of private property, or worse, forcing property sales - this is a problem. Banning to international investors - sure. Buying up land, sure, if they want. But banning sales from Germans to other Germans, or forcing sales to the government - no way.

I was only there a week but when I was in London 20 years ago, a sizeable number of the people in the office lived an hour or more away by train. The first data I could find bears out that London is different from the rest of the UK. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13627199

One shouldn't forget that suburbisation was a Cold War move - a very effective one and something Soviet Union could not even remotely afford to follow. Quite likely that it eventually prevented nuclear war by making it clearly unwinnable for the Soviets.

How so?

Do you suggest that sprawling suburbanised cities were too big to bomb effectively?

It also prevented firestorms by making buildings less dense - there wasn't enough density of combustible material. And made it possible for every family (middle class family - which in 1950s timeframe, meant qualified industrial workers, engineers, and the military - those a nation would need most in case of major war) to have a basement to escape fallout. Downtowns have been left to the part of population deemed useless and dispensable.

In Soviet Union, that kind of the most important members of society, lived in apartment blocks in city centers. And because Soviet Union did not have, and could not afford, mass automobilisation, they were stuck with that.

It made war clearly unwinnable for Commies.

Maybe so, but there seems to be a consensus that moving back to the neighborhood your grandparents fled is immoral (gentrification).

That is a severe misstatement of the other side of the argument. They have nothing wrong with just the act of moving, it's the act of displacing others and changing the community in such neighborhoods.

Moving somewhere always changes the community, and necessarily either involves displacement (move into someone's old apartment) or change in neighborhood character (add net new housing supply). This is a distinction without a difference.

Lots of people moving in always does one of the latter. Either they bid up the price of rent, or someone builds denser housing and thus changes the character of the neighborhood.

So it is a misrepresentation of what the other side thinks they are saying, but a correct representation of what their argument actually turns out to mean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com