Hacker News Reader

> What makes them better? I love Tokyo, for example, but would hate to live there - as it's too crowded for my sanity. But I'm not going to hate on others for wanting that. I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone.

I don't mean to single you out, but I find comments like this really perplexing. Do you really believe the GP meant "everyone should live somewhere like Tokyo"?

Most urbanists in the US are talking about fostering choice and options. Right now in the US you have effectively two options - rural or suburban car-centric living where owning a car is the only efficient option - or living in extremely dense environments that still cater to cars but its at least possible to live without one.

You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.

> You can look at a number of different countries in Europe to see how even small towns can still be built with a natural density curve to allow choice rather than the car-centric sprawl that we have here.

I think this is the model American urbanists need to take. Move to small towns where they can have more influence, and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities.

Get involved with development of a small town, guide it into these mixed use styles and attract like minded people. It would be significantly less of an uphill battle, and wouldn't anger all of the people who like the ways things already are in their large cities.

> and they don't have to try to force their preferences on existing large communities.

Or they can advocate for their ideology until existing large communities share their preferences.

I didn't really talk about climate above but that is a huge influence as well. I think advocates feel that time pressure and don't see any other option but to push for sweeping changes quickly and at a large scale.

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

Fortunately, you don't need to in order to not be car-bound. I live in a small college town (10k people), and ride a bike for almost all trips April-November. It's easy, because there's no suburban mess of six+-lane roads or 40+mph traffic to cross. We went to a party at a friend's house on Sunday on the other side of town; my five-year-old daughter road her bike, and I carried our two-year-old on mine. We are hours away from the closest "dense city", and biking is easy and safe.

My parents live in another ~10k person New England town. My 82-year-old mom drives her car once a week to get groceries, and walks for the rest of her trips. This myth that you can only be car-free (or mostly car-free) in big cities has got to die.

The stats are telling though, you put your family at 250% risk of death by choosing the bike over the car. That is a major problem that needs to be addressed with infrastructure.

Unless your city has separated bike lanes, it's hard to say that this is a safe choice compared to a car.

In the UK the stats are even worse, with something like 16x risk of death and 78x risk of injury. https://kennettpeterson.com/2016/08/26/riding-your-bike-is-7...

I feel pretty comfortable that riding a bike here is safer than driving a car in the suburbs. Drivers generally pay attention, and speeds are much lower. More infrastructure would make it better, but we have a real protected lane for the part of our commute that actually has significant traffic.

Most people can't even live in a walkable city if they wanted to. We haven't built enough capacity. The Bay Area basically stopped building housing after the 70s and is about a half million units short overall IIRC.

Tokyo density isn't necessary. I now live in a East Coast city that's denser than San Francisco and has very very few buildings over 4 stories -- there's a sort of low-scale density that pervades the city's entire surface area, as opposed to the California model, which is SFHs with big yards and massive setbacks over 90% of the urban landscape, 10% massive high-rises.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

That's great for them, but let's price things realistically. As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight. Their infrastructure isn't supported by their tax base and it never will be.

I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.

I hear this argument a lot, but it has never made a ton of sense to me: different area are specialized for different things, and they have a spillover effect of that specialization into neighboring areas.

Dense urban areas specialize in economic output: that economic output spills over into neighboring areas (urban areas produce more economic output than urban areas consume)

Suburban and exurban areas specialize in providing labor: that labor will spill over into neighboring areas (suburbs have more workers than people working in suburbs)

Rural areas specialize in production and extraction: those goods will spill over into neighboring areas (rural areas produce more raw materials than they consume.)

This means that suburbs will consume more than their "fair share" of economic output, just like urban areas will consume more than their "fair share" of labor and goods.

There is nothing inherent to the design of suburbs as they are that drives their efficiency at providing workers. It is fundamentally different from the economic efficiency of a centrally located factory or a very large rural farm.

The suburbs are the way they are (in part) because of the housing preferences of workers, which themselves are influenced by subsidies on sparse suburban living. A denser suburb could serve the exact same purpose in your model while supporting it's own upkeep.

Isn't this density argument true of pretty much anything, though? A really dense farm could serve the same purpose as a large rural farm while supporting its own upkeep better along multiple axes (e.g. water use, land-use, infrastructure requirements).

It seems like there are two arguments here: the first is that it's unfair (or maybe unreasonable?) that suburbs are subsidized by urban taxes. This is the point that I would argue makes no sense to me: lots of regions are supported by other regions in one domain or another.

There's another argument which is that denser land-use leads to more efficient land-use in almost every case. This argument makes sense to me, though I'd argue that efficiency isn't the be-all-end-all for why people choose to live where they do (e.g. lots of people even in this thread have expressed that they chose to live in a less dense area because it better suits their desired lifestyle).

My argument is this:

denser land-use leads to more efficient land-use in almost every case, but efficiency isn't the be-all-end-all for why people choose to live where they do. People who choose to live less efficiently should bear the burden of that inefficiency, with some exceptions such as mail delivery, education, etc. where equal access is a cultural value we want to uphold.

I guess the fundamental argument is that absent other factors, there is no societal economic benefit to a person living in a single family home on a half acre compared to a townhome so there isn't a reason to subsidize the upkeep of things related to their choice of living situation. Their share of road, water/sewer, electrical maintenance, infrastructure projects that support their commute, etc.

I probably should have noted earlier that I don't have a fundamental issue with taxes being a net negative from the city and a net positive to the suburbs. If that's what it takes to support social services, education, public parks, etc. then that's fine.

>As it stands right now, the exurbs are economic dead weight

>I think we might find that people not wanting to live in dense cities might feel differently if they are actually required to pay for the infrastructure that the dense cities are currently purchasing for them.

You mean like some monstrosity of a 6-lane intersection that got spec'd out that way in order to quality for some state grant? Pretty much all local development is "how do we qualify for someone else's money" driven.

These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.

> These municipalities could go it on their own. But if you turn off the money tap you also lose the ability to complain and threaten to take something from them if they don't do what you like and that is a compromise nobody seems willing to make.

Yes, these municipalities could pay drastically higher taxes to keep their infrastructure functioning without subsidies. That doesn't refute my point, which was that they might feel differently about the arrangement if those things were realistically priced in.

You can have suburbanism with walkable towns. This is how suburbs were built before 1945.

And those still exist! And any “small town” is walkable almost by definition-but people move away from them to the outskirts of the cities.

I don't think that's true. My grandparents live near a town of 4k people or so that's not walkable in the slightest, spread out over miles of highway with massive city-sized streets criscrossing everything. Most of the houses are 2+ miles away from the grocery store.

I'm sure they exist, but what is around the grocery store that there's no houses within 2 miles?

Often the "new developments" near these towns are out of town a bit, but even two miles isn't an insane walk.

I'll grant that many of them don't have much in the way of sidewalks, but you can often find them.

It has some unbuildable hills on one side, the county hospital on another, and then parking lots plus a giant highway interchange filling out the rest of the space.

Go visit Chadron, Nebraska sometime. On foot. You'll see the error in your generalization.

Arial reconnaissance seems to show it similar to the town I'm in; it could use a bit more sidewalks but the old downtown is certainly walkable and even Walmart shows obvious paths where people are walking across the grass/ground.

> I'd rather the government focus on fostering choice and options, rather than picking what they deem is "best" for everyone.

This is not a reasonable interpretation of reality.

One, the government effectively limits choice today via single family zoning and car centric city planning. Claiming NIMBYS are for more choice is disingenuous.

Two, there are some valid definitions of better, if not best. Dense, walkable, bike friendly, public transit oriented city planning leads to more active lifestyles, fewer transit deaths, less air pollution, lower carbon footprints, and better city financials.

Spreading out as worse isn't an assumption. It is a multi faceted and we'll documented reality.

The government is massively subsidizing private car ownership with zoning, minimum parking requirements etc.

It should be a personal choice, but until someone using a road needs to pay a toll that's high enough to outbid other uses of that land it's not, it's central planning.

>> If only we were hellbent on building communities where you don't need to get in a car every time you leave your house.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

I may have missed the part there were the original post said otherwise.

We could check the history books on this, but I'm pretty sure before cars everyone did not live in "dense cities". ;-)

One thing I noticed looking for a house is front side lot lines got a lot longer between 1900 and 1950. 1900 front lot lines are around 25 feet. 1950 you see 50-75 foot lot lines. Streets got wider too and setbacks were added. 1900 street is 35 feet no setbacks. 1950 with setback it's 100 feet.

Ignoring density that means people would have to walk 2-3 times farther to get to businesses. Except car centric zoning increased the distance between houses and businesses 3-10 times farther.

Very true.

(Though innovations like bicycles mean you can still get to places pretty fast.)

But per the OP's comment, if you're not in a densely populated city, your distances to other businesses and people is not primarily driven by how long it takes you to get to the end of your lot or how wide the streets are.

> Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to.

More people would like to live in dense cities, that what there currently are apartments available in dense cities. We need to build more dense, to answer to the demand with supply.

Of course not everyone likes dense, walkable areas. But dense areas, by definition, don't need much land area. So the rest of the land area remains available for sparse communities. Everyone should be happy, then.

"Not everyone lives in dense cities, nor does everyone want to."

I very specifically mentioned towns as well. Somewhere like San Luis Obispo comes to mind. It's about having places where you can walk, bike, or take transit for most of your daily needs. It doesn't need to be a city.

Coming from Europe, I was very surprised in Vegas when I needed to spend 10min crossing a road with a taxi, because it was hell to do those few hundred metres by foot.

I think that there is a lot of work that can be done for public transportation (and pedestrians) in the US. At least in dense cities.

Your "choice and options" opinion is a vapid opinion that's somehow weaseled its way into most degenerate right-wing/internet libertarian talking points, and "don't hate" is just wokeness adapted for the same purpose.

Free market capitalism does not have to apply to every single policy discussion. If you feel like you're being hated on, that's the price of having an opinion, in this case a bad one that leads to worse infrastructure and more pollution for nearly everyone else.