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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that for a series of reasons, during the 20th century the US built a lot of infrastructure that allows a lot (not all!) people to get further away from each other than is typical in Europe (probably elsewhere too, but I have no experience other than the US & Europe).

Neighbors on a street in London don't love but do tolerate each other, and deal with the implications of close proximity and shared responsibilites moderately well. In the US it's much easier to move somewhere and get a parcel of land that makes you feel like a sovereign property owner. Your neighbors are not as adjacent, and may even be ignorable.

Obviously this doesn't cover the millions of Americans who live in relatively dense (generally older) cities, but it does impact the millions who live in suburban, ex-urban and rural parts of the country.

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I agree. If we liked each-other a bit more tho that force wouldn’t be there.

I’ll quote the American classic “elbow room” as soft proof. https://youtu.be/aHVx4nqgMPQ

Wow, I had never seen that before. What a bizarre video with a forced tie-in of the whole manifest destiny idea with lunar missions (1976).

It seems to completely ignore the reality of communities and society (and history, for that matter) for an unquestioning expansion of our domain, all wrapped up in this patronizing metaphor about needing "elbow room".

Yes. It is our narrative. This is one of the most honest videos I’ve ever found of our true views on life in America vs the ivory tower discussions that constantly blame GM and Robert Moses for destroying their “communities”

If that is "The American Narrative" how did Chicago or New York City ever happen? How is it that a majority of Americans live in metropolitan areas rather than further out where they can more "elbow room" ?

The European conquest of north America and subsequent repopulation with immigrants (alongside a vastly diminished indigenous population) created an ethos and an opportunity for people who wanted to live away from everybody else to do so ... by pretending that the continent had been empty, and because of the need for natural resources, this was relatively easy to do.

But alongside that process, Americans were building some of the largest cities in the world, developing and improving "urban technologies", and generally pushing the boundaries of what cities could be (a role now largely taken over by SE Asia).

Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.

So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on

You might not like cars but everyone else does. They like and want cities this way and in reality it’s people like us that are the outliers. We aren’t right. We are going against the tide.

We built cities around cars Because we like cars — because they put distance between us and our fellow American we don’t particularly like or want to tolerate.

I write:

> Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.

to which you respond:

> So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on

Is there something that unclear about what I wrote?

Because you comments are constantly just boiled down to “it’s too complicated to understand”.

Look people left cities in the 50s because they didn’t like other people in cities. It’s a well known and established fact. It’s called white flight. And it continues to this day.

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