Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

US towns stopped building as a dense collection of buildings at the end of the 19th century. Modern "towns" are a dozen or so old buildings from that era surrounded by dozens of square miles of urban sprawl mcmansion housing.

Fundamentally the US simply has a density problem at all grades of construction. Its just more apparent in cities where the overconsumption of land per capita impacts more people.

View on HN

The US also has a ton of land. I stayed with family in a British suburb once, and everything was still neatly squished in together, even single-family houses, compared to the expansive yards of American suburbs. Kids could walk to school and everything.

The fact that kids walking to school is surprising really highlights the difference. Growing up in the UK, people who got driven to school were the odd ones (depending somewhat on the area).

There’s nothing more American than a big yellow school bus belching black diesel smoke.

When I was in middle school, we were picked up by bus, any time my parents had to go to school, we drove -- walking was never an option (which I assumed at the time was because it was too far to walk).

I recently looked it up on a map, and school was 0.7 miles from home -- a 15 minute walk. The worst part of the walk was that it crossed a 4 lane road, but it had a traffic light.... there were no sidewalks in our neighborhood, but that didn't stop us from walking to the bus stop.

Ironically, our neighborhood bus stop was 2 blocks from home in the opposite direction of the school, so I walked 0.3 miles away from school to take the bus... so in reality, the bus "saved" 10 minutes of walking time, though I spent more time than that waiting for the bus.

Now that I'm older and wiser (?) I seek out bike friendly commutes (through housing and job choices) and commute 15 miles by bike even though I have transit and car options. And I'll take a longer commute route to stay away from schools, seems that kids still aren't walking to school much, and my community has decided not to offer regular bus transportation so parents drive their kids, and it's like a car war-zone near the school

Having a lot of land doesn't change the fact that no matter how much land you have, there is still a place everyone wants to be. You could have a million new houses built in Idaho and it wouldn't make a dent of difference to the LA housing market.

The US real estate market is built like it can go infinitely wide, but the real world demand and price structures show the reality that density matters.

There was definitely a hard way to learn that lesson.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com