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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

just look at Brooklyn yo.... while it has some tall building, near Manhattan, it is mostly 2-3 story buildings (brownstones) or 4 / 5 smaller apartment buildings, and further down it has single family homes.

It has higher density than SF, Yet is provides lots of public space and it is not car hostile either.

Not everything has to look like either Manhattan, or Surburbian Sprawl like most other cities. Boston is unique in that area as well, especially around Brookline, Allston, South End, and Cambridge/Sommerville areas as they were built pre-car era.

It think Brooklyn and Boston (especially Cambridge) are the most 'human' scale it gets in the States, and they are fine places to live.

SF is not there yet. The density (is pretty low if you go off downtown) and hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.

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> SF is not there yet

It will not get anywhere near the feel of European cities, I've lived in both. Until they fix their serious housing issues with homeless / mentally-ill people camping on sidewalks and creating a hostile environment around the downtown core, it will never attract people to walk or bike.

I lived around SoMa for a decade and I HATE cars with a passion but slowly found myself walking and biking less and less as the years passed. I hated having to constantly scan my surroundings so I don't get mugged / attacked, random ill people screaming or spitting at me and having my locked bike stolen.

The best part about living in European cities was how safe it was to walk or bike to critical places.

> Until they fix their serious housing issues with homeless / mentally-ill people camping on sidewalks and creating a hostile environment around the downtown core...

Which SF (and all other west coast cities) can do by...building more housing.

Stop this bullshit of apartments in a small slice of land area and then single-residence detached housing as far as the eye can see. Build gentle density, walkups and row houses and four floors with corner stores. Don’t crowd density near main thoroughfares.

Build it and house your residents.

Once you’ve done that, the remainder of folks who have genuine mental and substance health issues—as opposed to the people who picked up drugs as a way of coping with the crippling depression of being unhoused—can be cared for properly.

I completely agree with you but this will take decades, at best.

I laugh when I look at the length of projects happening in and around SF, like the Caltrain electrification project (2016-2021?), Van Ness Improvement Project (2016-2022?) and the Downtown Rail Extension (2018-2027?) that got delayed over and over again.

Corruption, incompetence and greed is such bureaucratic red tape in SF that it reminded me so much of the public infrastructure projects happening in Eastern Europe (Romania) where they siphon so much tax money.

Can you imagine how expensive SF would be if it actually got its act together? It boggles my mind to imagine.

> I completely agree with you but this will take decades, at best.

Yup. I lived most recently in Atlanta, where they're on the right track with new projects (and a Microsoft campus to the west), so I expect it to be a much nicer place to live 20-30 years from now. But I'm 25! I don't have time to wait until retirement to enjoy my life!

Seattle is streets ahead of Atlanta, with some promising light rail expansions planned in the future. Again, on a 10-20 year timeline.

I have grown to despise cars so much that I thought it was time to give Japan a try. If I ever leave Japan, I'd sooner move to Germany or the UK than return to America.

I know exactly what you mean, I'm in a similar boat. I can't wait for decades to start enjoying the fruition of something I feel should be standard and already exists in many other places.

It's so strange to me how much I hate relying on cars now because I grew up in Canada and spent the majority of my time driving around everywhere in a suburb. I used to like driving when I didn't have to do it for every little thing but now I despise it and I better understand my environmental impact of constantly starting that engine up.

>Can you imagine how expensive SF would be if it actually got its act together? It boggles my mind to imagine.

SF will never get it together in its current form. The easy tach money being dumped into it breeds perpetual greed and stupidity. The money will have to run out and it will have to crash and burn before they get serious about not sucking. They will have to go through a Detroit phase.

As someone who has lived multiple years in Brooklyn and Boston, this actually does well to explain what I like about both.

I also don't think people understand the density and scope of Brooklyn. It's 5x the people of Boston in a smaller land area, but it's very few traditional skyscrapers. The brownstones really do a lot to give a homey feel to many areas.

+1 for mentioning Cambridge. It's the sweet spot for density. Lots of folks have back yards, but it's still possible to walk/bike where you want to go. I think a lot of folks conflate "urban area" with "financial district"

Boston is not affordable in any reasonable sense, speaking as a professional in the Boston area.

can you give a little more detail into this? what makes it unaffordable, and what's your context and experience?

[edit: this isn't a snip, i'm considering moving there and legit want to know]

A reasonable but not too fancy two bedroom apartment might run you high hundred thousands or low million.

If you are coming from SF it doesn’t sound crazy but at least got tech, salaries are far lower.

To add, food and such can also be more expensive. General CostOfLiving type stuff.

The area is colonial in age, but has thousands of college students and thousands of highly paid professional workers. This means both the apartment and the housing markets have huge demand, and people simply pay, because the alternative is to commute through terrible traffic and extra 60 min daily.

That's true although many (probably most) of the tech-related jobs are not actually in the city. In my experience, most people working in those jobs live in the suburbs/exurbs (and even in NH). It's mostly the branches of the west coast companies that are in the city as well as other industries like finance and healthcare.

Especially nicer areas in Boston (and Cambridge) proper have expensive housing. Not Bay Area expensive, but expensive.

That said, a lot of tech and related industries aren't in the city proper. Indeed, it's relatively recent that tech companies started moving back into the city proper after almost completely vacating it. And suburbs range from fairly expensive to, if not cheap, moderate. (I live about an hour west and my house on multiple acres is probably worth in the $400-500K range.

On the topic of cars, I would say that much of Boston and Cambridge is fairly navigable without a car. But it's not a car-free culture like NY largely is. People I know who live in the city but wither commute to jobs outside, visit friends in the suburbs, do outdoor activities in NH and elsewhere all own cars. You can manage without one. I did as a student. But it's pretty limiting, even with Uber, ZipCar, and so forth, if you want to leave the city on a regular basis.

Well my experience is colored by having moved here from Chicago, which is a city with a lot more going on, while at the same time having at least 40% lower housing cost. Prices are quite comparable to those in parts of say Brooklyn, but there's almost no cool cultural sustenance to make up for it. Just a bunch of biotech bros, doctors and university students.

I could see that. Visiting from the Bay I was blown away by Chicago. Every facet of that city seems studded with cultural gems, whether that be public spaces, museums, public art, history, architecture, nightlife.

When you compare housing + transportation costs, Boston is more affordable than Chicago, or all of the 5 fastest growing large cities.

  Housing + Transportation as a percent of income:
  Boston: 26% + 12% = 38%
  Chicago: 27% + 16% = 43%
  Henderson: 34% + 25% = 59%
  Seattle: 30% + 16% = 46%
  Atlanta: 29% + 19% = 48%
  Miami: 32% + 20% = 52%
  Denver: 24% + 18% = 42%

[0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/map/

[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/fastest-growing-cities/7010

Not sure where these numbers come from but they're entirely incongruous with my lived experience and that of my friends.

Edit: to be more concrete, you can today buy a spacious 2 bedroom condo in the South Loop right by the El for about $300k (I know because I used to own one). This would basically get you a broom closet if looking for something by the T in Boston (if you're lucky).

You can read more about the methodology behind those numbers on the cited website. They even provide the data behind the statistics for your own review. The purpose of my citation was to provide statistical evidence to counter your anecdotal experience of living in both places.

https://htaindex.cnt.org/about/#methodology

How do you haul wood from Home Depot's equivalent to make your own furniture? Do you have any privacy outdoors or landscaping?

I live in Brooklyn and have made multiple trips to Home Depot, via subway actually even! If I needed to take bigger loads, zipcar + 10 minute drive. No landscaping but I can chill on my backyard with a garden behind my brownstone. If I really wanted to make furniture out there I could probably manage. For smaller pieces of wood, I can pick from 4-5 hardware stores in a 10 minute walk radius.

One scalable solution is community workshops / maker spaces / community gardens.

While they have their place, I don’t think they’re scalable unless you’re talking about proliferating a lot of small ones. Beyond a certain number of people you get a real tragedy of the commons situation and you have to start enforcing rules and resolving disputes.

For the most part you don't. Anyone with a space intensive form of recreation (arguably this included raising a family) has to slog out a commute from the suburbs.

Yes there are some single men in their 20s with table saws in their living rooms but they're the exception and not the rule.

I think this is one reason you get people talking at cross-purposes about living car free.

Leaving aside where their job actually is... (Which, in the case of many cities may well not be in the city in the case of tech-related jobs.)

People tend to bias their activities to what they can do relatively easily. If you don't own a car and don't have a lot of space, you're probably not going to take up some space-intensive hobby or head off on a lot of weekends to hike or canoe. Maybe you'll lean a bit on friends with cars--though that tends to get harder as people get older and busy with their own activities. And maybe you'll rent a car now and then. But mostly you'll fall into activities that don't have a lot of overhead associated with them.

I don't have a car, but the city I live in has an excellent car sharing system. I just checked, if I wanted to go hiking tomorrow, the nearest suitable car that's available all day is 200m from my place. Booking it for 8 hours and driving 100km would cost me 33€ ($41), all costs included. The key is in a lockbox that opens with a card, so it's available 24/7/365 without another human in the loop. Booking is easy and convenient. If the weather were any good tomorrow, I might have done that and gone winter hiking. Not having a car doesn't have to be as limiting as you may think :)

Car-sharing (and Uber) definitely make it easier to live car-less in a city, at least at the margins. I know a couple in SF who don't own a car but they make pretty regular use of car-share. (Although last I heard they had their ZipCar account suspended for a minor accident and the alternatives or not as good.)

I still stand by the broader point though. To the degree that you don't really have the space for hobby/recreational gear and that it's harder to transport the things you need for activities, the less likely you are to do them.

We have a hardware store within a five minute walk. Most small things we can get there.

Lowe’s is about 15 minutes away, and is the only place to get serious wood. For small things we’ll walk there and back. For medium things we’ll walk there and UberXL back ($15), for large things we’ll zipcar or rent a UHaul ($25).

We don’t have private outdoor space, but we live in a very quiet neighborhood. For woodworking we get very far with a dremel and a jigsaw. :)

When I worked at Lowe's, we had pickup trucks to rent and offered delivery (with or without installation) for larger items.

I've never been to Boston but the description you give sounds a lot like London to me. Within the M25 (inner ring), London is mostly 2-3 story terraced houses with a few apartment buildings (don't think they go bigger than 8 stories) and taller social housing buildings. It's mostly dense but also plenty of green space and each neighbourhood feels mostly like a village within a city: ie a local high street, parks, schools, halls, religious centres etc within 15-30min walking distance. Of course it's not perfect and pre-pandemic the Tube was insane, but I'll take it over living in a car-reliant suburb any day.

As someone who's lived in both SF and BK, I agree.

One other point I'd like to add that makes BK more 'human scale' compared to SF is the speed at which cars travel. BK traffic (for the most part) moves significantly slower than SF traffic. There aren't as many uninterrupted stretches of road in BK where motorists can speed up to 50 mph. This makes BK (and Manhattan where traffic moves significantly slower than both) a safer place to walk and bike. Furthermore, the hilly topography of SF creates unique blind spots that the flat expanse of simply NYC doesn't have.

> 2-3 story buildings (brownstones)

IMO if it's less than 3 stories I wouldn't call it a brownstone. I guess park slope has some shorties but those are weird outliers.

> it is not car hostile either

Car hostility is a feature not a bug. Even at smaller scales.

Brooklyn suffers from the Els that were removed in the 1970s and never replaced, btw.

> hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.

I feels a hellavalot like Lisbon, actually. Hills and coastline are great for forcing us foolish humans to use land efficiently.

(My theory is that hills actually helped, not hurt, economic growth in Japan, Korea, and somewhat Taiwan in the end. It's like the opposite of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse curse.)

I bet it helped California too, and would help more if it weren't for the Central valley release valve.

Eternal shame upon Seattle for leveling hills!

Hills are great for aesthetics too. I grew up in the a flat Midwestern suburb so I'll never grow tired of biking to the top of a hill and gazing miles into the distance, watching the city confirm to each and every wrinkle of the geography. With mountains on the horizon... Why would I ever choose to be anywhere else?

I read somewhere that 3-5 story buildings make up the bulk of density, even in cities that are famous for their high-rises. High-rises are too expensive to live in for most people; even after adjusting for sky-high land cost.

In Brooklyn, at least, the 1-2BR high rises are currently cheaper than the comparable apartment in a 3-5 story building.

There was a huge construction boom in the last 5 years, and then COVID cratered demand for the kinds of people who live in those buildings. They’re currently listed 20-30% below what they were going for before.

The brownstone market has been affected too, but the good ones have not gone down much in price.

(This is discussing rent, not ownership).

Unfortunately they're only cheaper for 12-24 months because those listed rents are net effective rents, not actual rents. So you're typically paying a very high monthly but getting several months free.

It depends on the building. What you're saying is true during non-COVID times, but things have shifted since April.

City Tower, for example, has been listing several incentive-free rents in the $2000s. We were moving during this time and actually looked into it to confirm, because we didn't believe either. (I know, it's crazy!)

!! That's crazy cheap. Obviously my comment about mid-rises being cheaper is based off of the pre-covid data.

Yeah COVID has really tweaked the normal incentives.

A lot of these big buildings are very new, and are sitting way below projected occupancy.

They just need cash flow to pay their debts.

In contrast, most brownstone owners have only maintenance and taxes to pay. So they have fewer units to move, can afford to sit on vacancies, and have a relatively unique commodity on the market.

It’s been fascinating to see this all play out!

Isn't this just comparing a predominately residential district to a predominately commercial district?

I actually don't know how densely populated commercial zones are factored into population density so maybe that's irrelevant.

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