Remote work’s toll on cities
nymag.com
nymag.com
Suburbs where people live but do not have services also suffer.
As a result the classic Riviera model where people live spread, but also find local spread small services survive and flourish. At that point who want to be in cities or suburbs?
I fail to see ANY purposes to "convert offices to residential buildings".
I’ve been traveling Europe this month and visited several towns and cities both large and small. From tiny villages of a few hundred to 4,000,000+ people monsters.
One thing that struck me as vastly different than how USA does things was the mixed zoning. Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another. Everything happens organically near where the people are and the city/town/neighborhood/village never feels empty.
> Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs
This is exactly what Europe feels like. A high street is never far, even when you’re in a sleepy residential neighborhood. At the very least there’s a small grocery store and bar on the corner.
In the 70s already, the one near Toulouse was for some time perhaps the largest superstore in the world (at least the largest in Europe).
Also I spent the first 28 years of my life in Europe so I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp for what it’s like. Just that these defaults become more obvious when you live elsewhere for a while.
Average commute time is the same in France as it is in the USA. (Of course, in both cases, it varies a lot depending on the area.)
I lived a short while in a suburb of Paris; that municipality had 1 bar/café/pub for 50,000 inhabitants...
I worked in a suburb of Toulouse in a public service. I was walking 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile to have lunch in 2 different schools depending on the day, that's about 30-40 minutes there and back; I basically never walked across any fellow pedestrian, even though most of the time I was walking along main streets and crossing part of the 'centre'. The whole place was covered in private housing developments, same as neighbouring suburbs. Everyone drives to the central area or to other suburbs specialized in offices, industries or retail where they have their job.
I worked in another suburb, just next to the border of the city. I was the only one in the whole building (shared by several small companies) who lived in the city, all other people lived in suburbs, often remote ones.
I am now back in the countryside. There are still a few shops where I am, but their disappearance (started looooon ago) hasn't completely stopped. People don't walk or ride to the shop 1/4 mile away from their home, they rather drive 2 times 10 miles to get to large supermarkets. The population slowly changes, many newcomers never walk out of their house, they only drive out of it. Recently a few shops/services have even closed doors in the centre, and reopened out of the village, on the side of the main road, with parking lots. Elders cannot get there by foot easily any more; one of those place even only planned an entrance for cars, not for pedestrians. Despite all the nice discourses, in the 2020s it keeps on evolving as it did in the 1970s.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr an area in Germany close to the Dutch border
Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht (ok, not Holland...) had mass amounts of people from surrounding villages (essentially suburbs) with longer commutes to work in the city (model 1). I knew several people who worked in these cities and had a daily commute of 40 to 60 minutes one way for university or work.
A lot of Amsterdam can be seen as a densely populated area facilitating moving people from residential areas to commercial for work (essentially model 2). It absolutely has a rush hour of people commuting from both the surrounding areas and different neighborhoods; this is seen in both car traffic, trams, taxis, and trains. Many other large cities in neighboring countries (e.g. Brussels) would also fit this description.
These might not be a 2-hour commutes, but it's far from living, working, and shopping in your neighborhood.
Both the factors you mention - cars, and mass transportation - were huge technological advances of their times.
Technology has progressed since, so we might see different models evolve. But don't mistake those models to be permanent either.
- Approximately 5-6yrs ago the transit quality in the outer-boroughs (not Manhattan) became so bad that you could spend 2hrs hours switching multiple trains if you were going into Brooklyn. Trains would mysteriously not arrive, would run express, would claim they have arrived on official apps but the station was closed, etc. Then you think -- in 2hrs I could have commuted into the suburb and lived in a beautiful home for half the price and have a huge garden. And lots of people did exactly that.
- When metros didnt work, you'd Uber, but then punitive fees were added onto Uber rides to discourage that even. It was as if you'd be squeezed from every direction.
- For some minority groups (eg Asian women), crime became a huge problem. There wasnt much care from law enforcement (not to punish, but even just to be present at subway stations and cars). Many of my Asian friends moved out of the city for this reason. You'd see groups of 5-6 cops chatting together at the center of a station rather than be distributed across platforms across a station.
- Numerous metro steps had non-working elevators and non-working escalators, making travel with strollers dangerous or impossible. Good luck of you are on a wheelchair. Ridiculous ideas would be proposed where bicycles were somehow the magical solution to all...as if I could jump on a ride-share bicycle with two kids.
- Schooling was increasing byzantine. You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school. You could have two kids zoned to the same public school, but end up in two different public schools, making school drops impossible. Test-driven systems were changed, making things even harder. "Leadership" based public school application systems were proposed, which is a euphemism for "rich people" get accepted.
Ultimately cities are competing against suburbs, and from what I saw in my particular case the city option failed. Even I couldnt stomach the pain anymore and I gave up.
I suspect this is an attempt to distribute students between schools so you don't end up with one school made up of students all from a rich neighborhood and another with students all from a poorer neighborhood. That's how a lot of the US does things and the poorer families consistently get the short end of the stick.
- Housing would be built w/o appropriate ratios of schools being built in the same zone (poor city planning, and over reliance on connections vs rule of law)
- You could use connections to get to a well-rated public school w/o living in the zone, but at the expense of a local student being pushed out of zone. Note, this usually favors the rich/connected, not the poor.
- Application acceptances were at the discretion of the school w/o bright-line criteria, making favoritism a huge issue. Note, this usually favors the rich, not the poor. White the applications are straight-forward, NYC public school registrars could and would refuse to accept an application.
Ultimately, the causes do not matter -- all that matters is that the situation isnt palatable -- if you have 2 kids in two different school in two vastly different locations, and have no car, its close to impossible to drop the kids off with public transport and get to work on time.
I rely on remote work now. I go into the city 2x/wk. The school drop-offs are simple and live in a suburban township where local public school seating is guaranteed by law based on my lease/ownership address. No school registrar can mysteriously refuse to register me (havent faced that issue since i moved out of NYC), I dont need to lobby the local congress-preson to register my kids in school, nothing.
It "took a toll on NYC" but there wasnt really any real option provided by NYC.
Nothing bad happened. Why does it seem to be mandatory in large parts of the US?
I imagine the change comes from how sensitive people have become over leaving children alone under any circumstances. I.e. I don’t have kids myself, but according to a coworker who does, kids playing alone in the neighborhood would have been absolutely normal twenty years ago, but nowadays you might have Child Protection Services unleashed upon you, get accused of child neglect, and even have your kids taken away?
I recall someone did an experiment where they let their kid play at a playground, then took a seat on a bench where he could monitor his child, but still be far enough away to seem like the kid was alone. The goal was to see how fast some “Good Samaritan” would rush to the child in fear that he was being neglected. It didn’t take long.
Today, this would be illegal where we live. From what I understand, it would also be enforced and child-services would get involved. It is hard to get an answer on what the cut-off age is when kids can be left alone, we have not received an answer from any place we've asked.
While I appreciate the spirit of the law, and while we're well off enough that we dont need to worry about things like this...I do feel kids are quite coddled these days.
You're talking about the "summer of hell" on the subways, which was over 5 years ago at this point[1]. I grew up in Manhattan and currently live in Brooklyn (in an "average" neighborhood for transit; neither accessible nor inaccessible), and transit has been fine for at least the past 3 years.
You can see the improvement in the MTA's own statistics[2]. This year so far has been slightly lower than 2021, but the overall trend is positive.
> Schooling was increasing byzantine. You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school. You could have two kids zoned to the same public school, but end up in two different public schools, making school drops impossible. Test-driven systems were changed, making things even harder. "Leadership" based public school application systems were proposed, which is a euphemism for "rich people" get accepted.
I won't claim that this has gotten better or worse, but my perspective from going to public schools is that there's always been a degree of this.
The historical testing scheme is a way to ensure that rich people get access to the better NYC public schools: the standardized tests are laughably easy to prep for, and every UWS and UES'er of means for the past three generations has thrown money at tutors and test prep for their mediocre children.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/public-transit...
They don't appear to be simulated or theoretical: they're based on riders' swipes into the system. They do make certain ridership assumptions, however, because of the limited data (e.g. that customers use the same "corridor" during weekdays, and that the next swipe-in corresponds roughly to the last exit during weekdays). Those assumptions don't strike me as unreasonable, given the MTA's inability to collect exit data.
Edit: The page goes into detail on those restrictions as well. Interestingly, it sounds like OMNY gives them more precise timestamps, and thus has allowed them to improve the quality of the their metrics over the past ~2 years. The fact that they haven't swung substantially during OMNY's rollout indicates that there wasn't significant error in the previous data.
Meanwhile the metrics (and exit counts) will show regular operation. Sharing dashboards like these suggest a working system when it isnt actually working that well.
That being said: that's been true for 100 years. The claim (which I agree with!) that the subway experience is worse when poor doesn't have the temporal aspect that your original claim did (that subway performance has gotten worse recently.)
The few people I know who stayed behind are fighting are fighting fiercely to fix some of these issues. I madly respect and admire them for it, but holy cow does it take a toll.
At some level I’ve accepted that cities in the US are really optimized for people who don’t have kids. There are definitely things I miss about living in a city, but overall I think the trade offs are worth it to get out of dodge.
So while this is rather tangential to the post in general, The cargo bike is the exact solution to this problem[0]. Just because your city is terrible at bicycle infrastructure doesn't mean it's a problem inherent to cities.
And honestly by your post it sounds like New York is just terrible about infrastructure in general.
[0] https://www.babboe.be/media/welke-bakfiets/welke-bakfiets-ki...
Bakfiets are quite common and extremely popular in the Netherlands, and people carry their kids around in them all over the place all the time. They even have transparent hoods and windshields for the rain. And the kids and parents absolutely love the delightful experience of safely biking all around the beautiful parks and ubiquitous well maintained bike paths of the city and countryside together.
Biking in Amsterdam on a bakfiets with kids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je1ThOYD8Ic
And now they even have bakfiets eBikes with heavy duty powerful motors and stepless continuous variable planetary hubs with automatic transmissions (Enviolo Automatiq), which make them easy and effortless to ride. So you can stop at lights without shifting down, and they automatically shift down without pedaling and back up as you accelerate, so you can pay full attention to the road, other riders, and your kids, instead of worrying and hassling with shifting gears.
I have two Kogi eBikes with Enviolo automatic hubs (not cargo bikes with the heavy duty motors and hubs, but normal city and countryside bikes), and they really are as great as the reviews describe:
Review: Lovens cargo bike (with English subtitles!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx30anSN6Bo
@3:23> After a week this cargo bike really feels like a second car. Maybe even my first car. Before every journey I thought: Can I take the cargo bike, or do I need the car? Often the cargo bike sufficed. My wife needed to take the kids to the other side of town. She was late going to the playground, took the cargo bike, and arrived well ahead of time. We had a day out with it, disposed of waste paper and went shopping. There's no problem with this big box. So how does it feel? This is the more expensive, automatic bike. And I'm very happy with that. Here you set the pedal frequency, the amount of revolutions per minute. Then the bike changes gear automatically, so you pedal the same frequency while picking up the pace. The speed is great. It rides very smoothly up to 25 km/h. But you can keep pedaling and reach 30 km/h with your own leg power without too much effort. [...]
Is Enviolo the best internally geared hub for eBikes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vob5Rb4IKsw
@2:32> But another nice thing about this system is that you can shift it when you're stopped. And that's something that's pretty consistent throughout all internally geared hubs. This is considered an internally geared hub because the gears are on the inside, not on the outside, as you normally might find on a derailleur system.
>And in an urban environment, it's really helpful, because you come to a stop, and you can shift down, and you're ready to go!
>Because you might not necessarily remember to do it, or maybe in one of the common applications, like a cargo bike, you're worrying about the kids in the front, or your cargo that you're carrying, and you forgot to shift when you came to a light.
>You suddenly have to stop in an urban environment. You can easily shift down and get back into that lower gear and prepare yourself to start out again.
>And that's really helpful. So I think that's one of those things where people really appreciate it. Outside of that, I think that there's a lot of people that are just not so used to shifting gears specifically.
>The idea is that you can just twist it away from you to go into a lower gear and towards you to go into a higher gear. And the idea, because it's a continually variable transmission, you don't have steps to it.
>Normally a transmission on a car, like a five speed manual transmission, which I know maybe people in the States are not as comfortable or familiar with that sort of thing, but basically you shift into those five individual gears.
>Or on a bicycle you can shift seven, eight, nine, ten, they even go up to thirteen on a traditional derailleur, and some of them have even more than that, on the internal hub, like the Rollup. But it has a similar range as the traditional derailleur as far as the gears, now this one has 380%, but you basically have an infinite number of steps in between that.
>So as they say, for the Enviolo hub, it's an infinite number of gears. There's a couple ways of shifting the system. This one is a cable version on here, so you have two cables, and one cable will push it into a lower gear, and one cable will push it into a higher gear. And you shift it up on the handlebars.
>But you also have automatic versions, which can be fully automatic, and actually you don't have to shift it at all. You just program in what assistance level you want, and it's going to shift up or down.
Enviolo Stepless Shifting: A smart range of hubs for different riders needs.
>AUTOMATIQ: Why bother switching gears manually? The stepless automatic technology takes the ride experience to the next level with its ‘set it and forget it’ approach. Riders only need to set up the desired cadence, and the stepless automatic technology will adjust the enviolo system so they can always pedal at the same pace, even up or down hill.
>Integrated system: As part of the “integrated system”, the technology can be merged into the e-bike’s control unit. Simplifying the handlebar and the ride experience.
Even after the kids are big enough they get their own bikes to ride, the Bakfiets is also extremely useful for shopping, groceries, recycling, picnics, hauling cargo, and pets.
And most kids bike themselves to and from school, so swarms of frustrated helicopter parents don't need to all take time off work at once and all jam the streets at the same time twice every day to drop them off and pick them up from school.
And on top of that, the educational system and health care system in the Netherlands doesn't even suck, in fact are actually quite good, and as a result, the teen pregnancy rate is the lowest in Europe, and the teen suicide rate is much lower than the US, because they actually teach sex ed and accept people for who they are instead of shaming and brainwashing them into changing who they love and how they identify!
You should move to a better location or at least elect better leaders, if you live in such a drab dangerous car infested dystopian hellscape, that you think reality necessarily can't be any better than that. Don't your kid deserve better than that living in a world where people go out of their way to be hostile to bicyclists just to make a mean divisive political statement?
"It Tastes Like America" -MAGA Rednecks Rolling Coal On Bicyclists, Electric Cars, Pedestrians, Protesters, BlackLivesMatter, Trump Haters, Tree Huggers, Elderly, Children, Minorities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYPMbLO4pAY
You and your kids are really missing out of what parents and kids in the Netherlands and other less backwards countries than the US delightfully and safely experience every day, and you'll all be much healthier and happier, less angry and frustrated, with more exercise and fresh air and less pollution and stressful driving in jammed traffic in your life.
Urban Arrow Family Cargo Bike Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ2f08RHD1Y
>I've been really anticipating doing the review on this bike, but there's been a new version pending which is finally here. This is the new Urban Arrow Family UA4. This bike has always been very popular in our shop and it's just a good all around bike for carrying your kids and includes a bunch of different accessory options to fit your needs. Thanks for watching!
Why cities are better with cargo bikes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ-fch1LRWk
>We visited Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, to ride with avid cargo bike advocate Jos Sluijsmans. Sluijsmans is an organizer of the International Cargo Bike Festival (https://cargobikefestival.com/), the Cargo Bike Expertise & Innovation Center and is a member of the Dutch Cycling Embassy. Join us as we chat about why cargo bikes have so much potential, how Sluijsmans got involved with cargo bike advocacy and stay for the bike-centric infrastructure and lovely views (yes, there are goats). A big thank you to Urban Arrow (https://urbanarrow.com/) for supporting this video.
Trump tried to strangle Secret Service agent in attempt to reach Capitol on Jan. 6, aide testifies:
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/tr...
I'm sure where you live a bakfiets is a less viable option, but claiming that therefore using them anywhere is unrealistic is myopic.
On a side note, observe how none of the 5 riders have helmets!
Tokyo is a carpet of self-sufficient, dense neighborhoods, and yet people still travel all over the place in large numbers.
What you are describing is a random continental European city (that is Europe minus UK and Ireland)
Personally - I don't want to live in a city, or a town, or even a neighborhood. I don't mind seeing my neighbors but I don't want to hear them and I don't really want to interact with them. I'm perfectly happy driving 30 minutes or 45 minutes into town to run errands. I don't think that living out in the suburbs (or further) is "boring" because I don't like crowds and I'm not going to do anything that people in cities do for "fun" anyway.
I'm living in a suburb now because I need to be close to work - and for my career involving hardware, that's unlikely to ever change. But if I could truly work 100% remote and I knew this would last me 10 years - I'd move somewhere further away in a heartbeat.
If you think the world is made up mostly of people like me - you think remote work is going to devastate cities because who in their right mind would want to live there if not for work? If you think the world is made up mostly of people who want to live in cities in the first place - you think remote work will make cities better because a lot of disadvantages of city living are due to the need to accommodate a daily commute.
I grew up in rural France. Small village have shops, bars, services like post-office, hair-dresser and whatnot. It's not a dichotomy between things and absence of things.
Suburbs would be fine in my own personal book if they were offering basic services and a sense of comunauty.( not in warehouse operated by large chain, but by people living there and earning a livehood out of it )
Totally get your point about being left alone, but I still want the place I live and raise my kids to be a network of humans sharing a sense of belonging. Not private lots next to each other.
1. The suburbs I grew up in had mixed zoning, you had apartments, multi family homes and single family homes in every 5x5 blocks.
2. There were smaller public spaces reasonably located to where you lived. Instead of massive parks for an entire corner of the suburbs, you had a lot of empty lots developed into smaller gardens bustling with neighborhood kids
3. Streets were narrower and the sidewalks were wider
4. Shops and mom and pop stores were part of the neighborhood. Those apartments that I talked about, had cafes and local stores where the store owners knew you and your parents. I remember walking alone to the store at the age of 7 and bringing back stuff my mom needed, without having a phone on me.
The more you make people spend time in their neighborhoods, the more you have a character. If you have to take your car out for every little thing, you spend more time in your car than walking around and knowing people in your neighborhood.
I find this refrain tiresome. I grew up in a US suburb and had similar experiences to what you describe outside the US. I mean, yes, there are some suburbs in America that are husks of their former selves due to economics, etc. But I grew up in a small midwestern suburb of a failing city. I had the following:
1. Would regularly walk or ride my bike to the store with my friends to get things at the age of 7+.
2. A vibrant art scene.
3. A plethora of science and learning opportunities including a branch of a well-known University.
4. A walkable downtown with mom and pop stores.
5. 30 minutes from big events like concerts from our favorite rock bands. 60 minutes from famous sports franchises. 30 minutes from the symphony and art museums.
6. 5 minutes in the other direction was rural farmland where you could learn about agriculture, etc.
Older suburbs in the US did have this, and I grew up in one, it is now empty and vacant. Many suburbs I lived in were all bedroom community types with no shops, no sidewalks, etc.
I sort of did find what you’re talking about in the US later on, a newer upscale model of mixed living, it wasn’t bad. It had a lot of chains though and it was very expensive.
So I will definitely grant you it is possible in several regions that to find this sort of lifestyle, it is not easy in some parts of the US or cheap in general (in my experience).
Living in Europe now, it’s been very easy to find these integrated neighborhoods or towns, and they come in all price points.
To be sure there are still bedroom communities, they’re just not even close to as common where we are as they were in the US.
I don’t think this is a radical statement if you just compare gas prices, it is rather organic and obvious why things are this way (and 30-40 other equally important factors contributed I am sure)
From 2018 through 2020, the NCVS found that the violent-crime rate in urban areas was between 29 percent and 42 percent higher than the rate in rural areas
The property-crime rate in urban areas was nearly twice as high in 2021 as in suburban areas (157.5 to 86.8 victimizations per 1,000 households)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-rural-a...
I don’t see whether the study you linked counts suburbs as urban or as rural.
Most studies do urban, suburban or rural.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
Without that split, claims about suburban communities are hard to separate out.
Perhaps they are soul-less, but I think it’s quite beautiful with trees and trails and safety.
Not that you can't find any of this in the city (though almost all the ethnic markets are gone now), but the rent inside the city proper has gotten so high that you're often left with large chains and places that are trying too hard to be "hip."
In general I feel like I'm more likely to find a cool hidden treasure exploring the suburbs these days than exploring the cities.
And I don't think it's just around here. For example, I've noticed that many Chinatowns around the U.S. have moved towards the suburbs over time.
Ah, comparing France of 30 years ago with US today. Reality: France has changed. I mean, this model hasn't totally died, but it's in it's last spasms.
But they closed the school a few years ago, and everyone has to drive to a big burg.
Of course I get what he meant, and everyone has a different definition of 'small' and of 'village'. Personally, I'd says shops start from 'big village' and post-offices from 'small burgs'. But you can have quite many neighbouring country municipalities in a row which do not have any shop.
-----
Yeah, in the last 30 years, the spread has been terrible, and it is not contained to suburbs of cities and big towns, but it also affects remote areas, around small burgs and even many villages. What we have then is suburbs without the 'urb'; perhaps even more depressing to witness than actual suburbs.
The spasms I see are good ones in my book. Yes, that will be bumpy soonish. But I see life there as many fold more agreeable than in rural US ( that I only now superficially; one short decade )
But that’s only me; and I’m culturally very French so no surprise in my preferences either
I hope a day comes when renewable energy sources fix this issue.
>I don't mind seeing my neighbors but I don't want to hear them and I don't really want to interact with them.
Nobody wants to hear their neighbors. The biggest complaint you have about cities is shared by most of the people who like them. It's just that buildings are often not built to manage noise properly, for a variety of reasons (age / imperfect information / deregulation / …).
Of course, if it offers you no upside, don't live there. But I suspect that perspective is rare.
many other places across Europe dont have this or most people arent conveniently located
but my point is that this doesn't seem to be an option at all in the US, unless you are in a nice development within one or two cities. not an option in the suburbs anywhere to my knowledge.
Some wfh people have easily found it in resort mountain towns in USA, which have similarities to European resort mountain towns (outdoor activities, walkable, size constrained by geography).
Many people still want to live in a dense, walkable neighborhood, though; supply is just fixed at ~1940 levels forever. The few prewar walkable cities that still function such as New York and San Francisco are very expensive as a result. Housing that was built for and occupied by working class people for generations is now too pricey for all but the rich.
That's an incredibly broad statement since most zoning is handled on the state, county or city level. There are plenty of places in the US where someone could build an equivalent SF or NYC and yet they don't.
> The few prewar walkable cities that still function such as New York and San Francisco are very expensive as a result.
You seem to be drawing a causal link here, walkable leads to desirable and expensive. Yet, as I mentioned before, not only is it possible to build walkable cities in many states, there are plenty of other walkable cities that aren't expensive or desirable.
I suspect that SF and NYC being the both historic and a hub of two giant economic engines of the US, the tech and financial sectors respectively, has a lot more to do with the pricing of those areas than their walkability.
Demand - from various sectors over time, sure, but also geographic constraints
Each are different enough to only talk about in isolation, but of the commonalities you can't dismiss how interrelated the density and walkability are. A byproduct of the geographic constraints with a constant need to fulfill the demand.
https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines has some good, if brief history of all of it.
Can you name some of them?
I believe this is not true. Some people want this, yes, and it may be that they are overrepresented here or tend to form bubbles so that they think this view is predominant.
If a majority of people wanted it, it would happen due to the majority electing people to their local governments that support it.
I can support candidates who campaign on allowing mixed-use in their zoning policy. Or I can support candidates who support keeping business, industrial, and residential areas separated. It seems that most people (not all) support the latter.
The happiest existence I had lifestyle wise was living in university. It is the closest socially acceptable communal living experience in modern capitalists.
There were stories of colonists captured in Indian wars by tribes, "freed", and they ran away to go back to the tribal group rather than go back to colonial life. You know, Dances with Wolves but in real life.
There was a slight uptick in communalism in the early internet, but the MBAs have stamped out that out hard.
Honestly, for places like San Francisco where Silicon Valley essentially destroyed the communal aspect of the city, all of those tech bros moving away would be good in the long term. Of course it would also take a massive collapse in property values, and kind of like revolution, that's never a good thing.
There's quite a bit of this on the East Coast as it tends to be older. Pre-war towns in particular. Some rather affluent places too with trains to the local major city, etc. It's nice to have large single family homes and yards and be able to walk to the butcher, coffee shop, bookstore, or restaurants and the train. However, in Europe you generally won't find large, single family homes in this type of setting. Mainly multi-family and very small by American standards. Especially the UK.
I would need some specific examples to look at for inspiration though, and see whats wrong with them
> However, in Europe you generally won't find large, single family homes in this type of setting. Mainly multi-family and very small by American standards. Especially the UK.
You're right, I want the rich person's classic large Parisian apartment facing the main thoroughfare, with alleys of winding shops and cafe's in the back.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...
To pick an entirely not uncommon example from my own life...
I'm just moving to the suburbs but I had to specifically go looking for one with shops in walking distance. It's far from the norm; I've lived in places before where the only way to a shop was along a major highway and it was too far to reasonably walk unless you had no choice.
For reference I live 3 miles from the center of a town with a population of about 280,000.
Yes. Zoning in the US tends to be restrictive and exclusionary, as in a given area is zoned for one type of use to the exclusion of any other. This means an area zoned residential does not allow any commercial use, not a local grocery, not a restaurant, not a barber shop. Furthermore, residential zones tend to be further restricted in order to preclude any sort of MDU or even townhouse, it's common for suburbia to have miles and miles of "single family" (exclusively detached residential) zoning.
And this is not small cities in the boondocks, Seattle, Charlotte, Arlingon, or San Jose, are above 80% single-family zoning.
We also have college towns and small cities! I tend to pick places where there’s something walkable, and have never lived in a place where I couldn’t walk to a shop or restaurant (although ”walkable” is subjective I guess, I’ve been in places where I had to walk 45 minutes through parking lots to get groceries).
I dunno, suburbs are a funny thing… it is easily knowable what they are and what you are signing up for when you move to them, but lots of people end up there as a sort of default choice (or maybe not really a choice, they can be the most affordable place to get a house that fits multiple kids comfortably and isn’t in the absolute middle of nowhere).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg&t=8s
[2] U.S. and European Zoning, Compared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9C866I2s
source: professional urban planning office in California
I lived with urban planners and architects for 20 years, read books about zoning, about the effects of urbanization on aquifers and rivers, about the differences between cities that grew organically like São Paulo or Mexico City vs cities that were bulldozed to fit a central plan like NYC.
Never ONCE in my life I had read contemporary literature or heard a urban planner defend suburbia, or advocate for single use zoning only, or even say neutral things about American Suburbs. A majority of Urban Planners and Architects across North America, South America and Europe (my sample) are very much against it as it's not sustainable, creates traffic and other myriad of problems.
(That's not to praise the Commissioners' plan, per se, but only to observe that no dense city was bulldozed to enact it.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811
Most of it wasnt done maliciously, but a city doesn't create square blocks, nice and uniform, on its own as it grows from a few hundred thousand to a few million inhabitants. If it grows organically, as in without a central plan driving it and pruning uncontrolled growth, you will get a very heterogeneous city layout.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan_Hill,_Manhattan [1]The creative destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940
US cities are abysmal. Chronic underfunding of public transit and bad zoning policies that make it illegal to build dense means that we have some of the most unlivable and exclusive cities in the developed world.
People are speaking with their actions. No one wants to deal with commuting downtown anymore. The expense, the time, the stress, just to further line the pockets of a small number of already incredibly rich rent seekers.
Forget it, I am done and 100 more submarine articles will not get me back.
No thanks. I'll take my remote job and live an hour outside of a city, to enjoy silence, wildlife, bonfires, and saving my hard-earned income in nature.
Large scale rent seeking behavior is not positive for economies. Just ask the Saudis.
Those who monopolize location are the landlords. Their value comes from location. Transportation and communication makes location less valuable. It allows people to escape from under the thumb of landlords and get their own little plot of land so that they don't need to pay rent to anyone else. Imagine a world in which you can snap your fingers and instantly be transported anywhere. What would be the value of living close to your job? Or in a specific location? There would be no premium at all. All improvements to transportation, whether it becomes cheaper, or faster, or more comfortable, is a small punch at landlords. The same for any increase or improvement in communication. The internet, VPN, portable computers -- these are all little punches at those who sell location.
Moreover while location is not produced, transportation and communication are produced goods. It does not matter whether you are talking about planes, cars, buses, trains, motorcycles, phones, cell towers, they are all made in factories by workers, whereas location is not. So tilting the scales in favor of communication and transportation takes the value that was captured by landlords, and shifts it towards productive industry. It's really a win-win.
This. So much this. Reducing the "cost" in time and/or money of physical distance results in huge compounding improvements to people's lives. People can work more lucrative jobs. They can shop at the the value-priced big box store than the overpriced bodega that has to pass on its crushing rent. They can more easily justify seeing friends and family. The list goes on.
The automobile society notion of residential far from workplace is just bad.
If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?
* One of those jobs was close enough to walk (1.1 miles). I would regularly walk that commute, in most anything less than hellish rain or heavy snow. But that means that my previous job from that residence was 2.7 miles away, which isn't nearly as practical to walk year-round in New England.
Once people are more dug in, they will often just eat the longer commute. However, there is a sizable "transient" population that is as likely to move to another town when they change jobs. This is true of people like academics, doctors, and so forth.
There are certain occupations that are fairly centralized, due to being the seat of government and home to a large university. My spouse just changed jobs at the U, and we already live close to there.
What? Why do you think that? Plenty of people with children in school live in rented apartments, condos, townhomes, and even houses.
So how would this work when you switch jobs, do you keep moving residences? That would be super-disruptive. Also, what if you switch jobs but you're in a timed-lease? What if you switch jobs and change residences but your kids are in a local school? These things get really complicated.
This is an Activist piece - not an Analysis piece. You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change.
It cherry picks a number of facts in order to further the arguments.
Can't be done. Office buildings of significant size are not engineered for 24/7 human occupation. The sewer will be inadequate. The water will be inadequate. Retrofitting this would be spectacularly expensive, if it's even possible, as mechanical and plumbing chases are sized for the original design requirements and are difficult (if not impossible) to alter. It may be possible to do if residents were willing to use shared bathrooms, but they will not be.
HVAC is not sized for 24/7 habitation either. Neither are electrical requirements. Stoves produce a lot of unaccounted for BTUs. They require larger electrical service. The electrical service has to be metered individually, which requires quite a lot of space.
Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up. Nobody is walking that. The elevators are sized according to different rules than residency, so there are not enough of them, and they won't all be on a generator anyway.
Where you have plenty of space to develop renewables in a dense city? Where the home garage to recharge your car? Where the place to get larger and larger package due to the flourish of on-line retail? Where the place for future flying cars/drone delivery etc?
If middle-class people start to de-urbanize cities would be let full of desperate with much job offers to find work.
The denser an area is the more territories around are needed to feed it, to a point of 1000+miles ranges vs few if population is not that dense.
Anyway, at least in Europe people who want to be in cities normally are a not so marginal cohort, but still far little in size than the one who want to flee, only few countries where services are not developed outside cities have different mean opinion.
(In general, it's incorrect to assume that WFH implies a desire to flee to suburbia, particularly in dense cultural hub cities: people often seek employment in these cities because they want to live there, not the other way around.)
Put another way, what matters is the maximum volume the electrical, sewer, HVAC, elevators, emergency power, etc can handle. If it is scoped to handle 1,000 people for 8 hours of a day, it will do just fine for 300 people 24 hours per day.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up.
I mean, you’re acting like 50-story residence buildings don’t exist, when in fact they do in many cities already.
That... depends? On one hand, an office building scoped to handle 1000 people for 8 hours a day might handle more peak toilet flushes than 300 people for 24 hours a day, but the latter might get way more peak shower/dishwasher/sink/washer use than the former.
The claim -- which all the experts seem to back -- is you can't convert large office buildings to residential. For some of the reasons parent says, plus more importantly, you only have a habitable outer shell or donut given light requirements. And it's extremely expensive to take water and sewer, which are all located in the core, and distribute them out to each future apartment.
See eg https://slate.com/business/2022/12/office-housing-conversion...
Almost. Use case for commercial office and residential is significantly different. In an office building, the largest electrical load will be HVAC. In a residential environment, it will be more evenly split between water heating, HVAC and appliances.
For example, in an office building, you might have one or two smallish water heaters to provide hot water for sinks, with a recirc pump to keep the water heater requirements down even further. There may not even be a dishwasher at all.
In residential, you get dishwashers, washing machines, showers and sinks that all need hot water. And they will run often, usually at fixed time points meaning you cannot diversify the electrical in the same way you would for an office building.
My point about a 50 story converted office building is the office building's elevators are sized differently for a different use case. There is a great deal of witchcraft and sorcery in how elevator companies do this calculation, but a 50 story residential has different elevator requirements than a 50 story office. It may not be much, but it is different. And you can't just add an elevator if you need to. They are integral to the structure of the building.
All this to say, yes, it can be done, but it won't be. It's fantastically expensive and there just aren't enough rich people to justify doing more than one or two.
This also does not apply to a more modest 3, 4 or 5 story office building. The requirements are much more manageable for these. I am only referencing the big buildings, maybe 10 stories or higher.
And while business buildings are not internally designed for 24/7 occupancy, their accesses are scoped for much higher occupancy as businesses tend to have denser occupancies than residential.
So most of the problem is the interior setting, which has to be retrofit anyway.
> Also, when some natural disaster hits and the city loses power? You can't go home. Your home is 50 floors up. Nobody is walking that.
Residential towers exist all over the world. And that's literally what Billionaire's Row is.
It can be done and has been done, but what the article fails to recognize is that it is spectacularly expensive—the original build-out, of course, but also the maintenance (I’ve seen this firsthand in the stratospheric HOA fees in the one class-A office-to-residence conversion I toured in my condo search).
Office to residential will happen, but it will be at the top end of the market. It is fundamentally incompatible with affordable housing.
I mean, of course it can be done. We can also solve the homeless problem by moving them all to the Moon and building Moon bases.
The point is that it is not practically possible for the reasons I stated as it is fantastically expensive. There are simply not enough rich people to buy into a converted office building. You will get a handful of them in name brand cities, but the ability to secure financing for these things will very quickly vanish.
I live in an office building that was first opened in 1914 and was converted into residential units.
Another 18-floor office building across my street is being converted as we speak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists_Theatre_Buildin...).
The Park Avenue Building is supposed to be converted in residential units by the end of 2024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Avenue_Building).
The Book Tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Tower) is nearing completion with a host of residential units in its main tower.
Griswold Street, a major avenue in Detroit that cuts through our financial district has converted so many old office buildings into residential units that I have lost count.
The high-rise building part remains and is being converted into residential units right now.
From the other nymag.com submissions on HN, and a look at their frontpage, and my past experiences with their articles, it seems like NYMag is an Activist news outlet, so this is not very surprising, if rather disappointing.
There's zero reason why an article advocating for a change can't also contain trustworthy facts. I'm not saying this article is a good example of one, but I wouldn't follow "You cannot trust facts reported in an article that's advocating change." as a general rule. Pretty much every article advocating for a change is going to include facts, but that doesn't make them all untrustworthy. Advocating for something in an article doesn't require the author to ignore everything that doesn't support their viewpoint, or lying/misleading, or cherry-picking.
Identifying that an author is advocating for something should cause you to be on the look for out for those types of things (that's just critical thinking), but they shouldn't be assumed and the article or the facts it contains shouldn't be immediately dismissed as untrustworthy or wrong based on that assumption.
In the end it seemed likely that commercial landlords were a driver behind the politicians - if people no longer come to the city, who will rent my extremely expensive office space?
British workers were made to feel like they were letting the country down, not coming in to the city, not spending money in city-centre shops, personally responsible for bankrupting business owners.
Meanwhile my local sandwich bar and my local coffee shop were getting a bunch more trade. As were my local tradespeople, as I used what I saved on train travel to pay for work on the house.
The effort to drag people back to workplaces was massively short-sighted in a country where politics and earnings are massively london-centric, where public transport is often straining to meet demand for commuters, and commuting by car jams roads and pumps out tons of unnecessary CO2.
The hollowing out of big city centres should be considered a victory. Spread the wealth, cut unnecessary travel. And give commuting time back to families.
This will have some positive effects, like having the countryside and its adjoining natural environments better curated, along with the large underclass masses living more resource-efficiently. The main downside will be that cities will be even more of a concentration of crime and other social ills, combined with worse public infrastructure due to reduced city tax revenue.
I got very lucky in finding a highly unusual job paying >>> median wage (but still very light compared to if I moved to the Bay Area). Then the pandemic happened and now in my most recent job search (just completed, I got laid off in November alongside all the other people) pretty much every place offered remote without even asking and I had my pick of pretty much any company I wanted despite my house being literally in a (feed)corn field.
So pretty pumped about some of these very profitable companies finally directing some (prodigious) payroll into my locale. Both selfishly and because I hope it helps inject outside cash locally where it otherwise wouldn’t ever go.
But as I said, excited for you as it currently stands :-)
The same goes for people in Romania who absolutely understand the exact same thing. They prefer jobs to be in their country.
It is legitimate for people to worry whether jobs will be where they live or elsewhere.
I also think opportunities are only going to grow.
And let’s be honest, if places really could, they would’ve already outsourced to people where COL is 99% lower instead of 20-50% lower.
I do think people tend to overestimate how much cheaper it is to live in flyover country. Even real estate isn’t that% much cheaper unless you’re literally buying a farm with no good internet. And iPhones cost the exact same. So it’s not like companies will be eyeing Kansas as the next India or Estonia. It’s just not enough of an arbitrage to be worth it. Most places I looked at recently were only geo-adjusting base comp by either 0 or 10%.
This is all for senior software eng positions though. Junior and mid positions might be a very different story due to supply being so much higher.
I don’t think you could even get a response from someone at the local ISPs to laugh at you for asking about running fiber though, so you do have to pre-check that if (since) it’s important to you. (I did). It’s ATT and Spectrum (née Charter) around here.
For context, my family recently relocated to a medium sized Florida town (~100k) from a Portland suburb.
It was really interesting to hear the 20 and 30 somethings in line with me talk about Portland. They seemed to prefer it to Florida (where one grew up) and Portland, Maine (where the other grew up). They loved access to snowboarding (1.5 hours away from downtown Portland) and the restaurant and music scene. I half assumed they would be intending to flee Portland, but their mindset was not the same as mine is (saturated with bad news from Twitter and shitty local news stations).
My news feed is all about the crime in Portland. These two people clearly weren't bothered by this to the extent I was (with small kids, etc). I think for many young people, living around other young people is still very, very important. I miss that part of my old life. It seems very stale in central Florida, to be honest.
It's a small sample, but if cities could convert their downtowns into affordable homes (option to buy, not rent) I bet there would be a resurgence of young people establishing long term ties. If you don't have kids, you can avoid the homeless people (Portland recently voted to evict them from downtown anyway) on your way to multiple dates and drinking establishments.
It (revitalized downtown) happened in Detroit, right, when they were at the bottom. Why not in all the other cities? Crime is, even now, no where near the levels it was in the 80s when I grew up in Portland never felt uncomfortable at all. Social media is amplifying a point of view for certain people, IMHO.
I treat others with respect and mind my own business. My neighbors reciprocate, and don't bother me.
For various reasons it was convenient for me to go for regularly long walks late at night, and I never ran into any issues with that. There was one homeless guy who was grumpy I woke him up, so I learned to aim my headlamp better.
In my experience people who end up seriously hurt by criminals tend to be criminals themselves. It's pretty easy to stay out of all that.
So, I went and looked at the crime reports (which are from the police, and come with their own filters, of course) from Twitter.
Almost all the homicides are in areas where significant homeless populations exist. And, very late at night.
My takeaway is that it is currently very dangerous to live on the streets. You call them criminals, and I think that is the inevitable consequence of living on the streets, especially when more and more cities are outlawing homelessness, but that's probably more a perspective, and I still have a lot of fear of people living on the streets.
Is that the message we see in the media? No, we see that it is more dangerous for the "common person living in a blue city."
Random violence is not the root cause of the increase in the homicide rate.
This makes me frustrated because the police could easily target those areas from midnight to 6 am and solve 80%+ of the homicides. Or, they could, if you believe that police can stop that kind of violence. Maybe they can, maybe they cannot. They should not be in the business of solving homelessness.
The story that homicides in a liberal city were due to BLM protests is a much more bombastic and clicktastic story than that.
Sound to me that what I found aligns with your experiences in many ways.
But since this is a literal nightmare in SF, being less "car dependent" or appeasing these whining activists is the least of my concern.
I could give a shit less about "car dependency" if I have to worry about my own personal safety on a regular basis. Expecting people to put their own personal safety on the line to reduce "car dependency" is asinine. If city advocates want people to move to their cities, they should get their shit in check first before even bothering to ask
If you’re ok with car dependency then the suburbs are more comfortable. If shopping and hooking-up aren’t as important than safety you are winning.
Ok. But what about cars getting broken into? Isn't that incredibly common?
If I hypothetically lived in SF, I definitely wouldn't bring a car just bc I don't want my catalytic converter getting stolen or the windows getting broken
They have space convertible to offices aplenty, revitalizable downtowns, cheap housing. I myself just made the move from the bustling capital city to a wonderful city of 17,000. I bought a large Victorian house for half of what my tiny city house was worth. I can walk to the library, movie theatre, restaurants, cafes. Nature is all around. There is an Amtrak Station. I could go on!
Modern cities have economy of scale as main reason to exists. Most western word is evolved toward tertiary sector, most cities have experienced such trend more than the rest of the country. Cities still have some social purposes of course, being many means meet more people to select as friends, partner, have some services that are unlikely in the countryside etc but the main raison d'être was economy of scale.
Without offices who need much of restaurants, health-related services, shopping malls etc? Here (EU) it's a not-that-recent trend that large malls, supermarket etc disappear or suffer and get split in more smaller instances spread in the territory BUT even if we do so WHO will reside in cities?
Who want to live in an apartment instead of a home to WFH anyway, also counting the fact that many services will closed in cities due to lack of office workers?
Would you (not your belief about others) be interested in co-working / co-living locales, in different countries (think Costa Rica, Tenerife, Zanzibar) with excellent maintained QoS connectivity, and (higher tier offering) where your right to work (local work visa) for your home-country employer / clients was looked after by the company hosting the network of sites? Goal: to liberate you to maintain your employ but hopping from locale to locale on a monthly or even weekly basis, with diverse life experiences to go with it.
(cue HNers posting links of offerings that already exist but I promise from experience don't really offer at any ubiquity or scale)
Important caveat: assume your home country's tax regulations have no contest with your working physically from outside its borders.
That said, biggest problem with "working from a different country" for me is self control. It's hard to actually be productive when the weather is beautiful, lots of interesting things are going on, and the beach is calling. Perhaps a co-working, or some kind of organized offsite with coworkers could change that.
• I love the articulating of tbe hard-to-be-productive-because-beacb problem. I definitely hit that in coastal Zanzibar earlier this year.I actually think that's a really worthwhile problem to solve, probably by siting a co-working / co-living community more inland.(Like, there's a reason why Obama wrote his book in inland Ubud of Bali rather than coastal Denpasar).
Weekly hopping is too frequent for me, however, and a month feels barely long enough. I’ve been looking at 90-day minimum stays, with a preference for 6 months to a year.
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat with someone seriously interested in this.
Cities are very upset tax receipts are lower and are increasing taxes to shore up budgets. Not a good sign.
Got it, the writers have an agenda.
Prior to the industrial revolution, most people worked in the same place that they lived. Farmers farmed the land adjacent to their house, shop owners lived above their shops, etc. Working in an office is not natural; working in or adjacent to one's home has been the norm throughout human history.