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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't match my experience. In fact one thing I noticed living in Japan is how much more willing people are to spend money to meet up. Lots of events costs 3000-7000 yen. Clubs and bar have a cover charge. People will organize parties where they rent a bar and tell their friends it's 4000 yen each (about $27 currently but was closer to $40) in the past. They'll even have house parties and tell everyone to pitch in 1000-2000 yen. In the states, my experience is even a $5 and people will complain.

The point being it's culture not economics. In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.

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Out of all developed nations, Japan is probably the one least affected by housing pricing in the world seeing as though Japanese housing depreciates rather than appreciates over time. Rent prices in America are a staggering 177.4% more expensive than Japan[1]. Ever increasing house prices, caused by the underlying power imbalance between capital and labour, is the root of all evil in the Anglosphere. It will not stop until wages are restored to pre financial crisis levels and assets and wealth are taxed at a level equal to or higher than work. Until that happens, the wealthy will continue to squeeze everybody else out of a life.

[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

Who would have thought that when you don't artificially limit housing supply people can actually afford it!

Lots of examples in Latam as well.

Not keeping population increasing for as long as you can with migration helps too People will buffer their prices up often even trough stagnating purchasing power or dips due to construction when land isn't made anymore and the gov will make sure demand keeps growing lest it affect the lines.

Isn’t the depreciation story kind of an outdated idea? While yes that was the case but it was also true that the 50s-90s comes were generally not very modern, built with not much comfort in mind and so it was expected you would be rebuilding. In most of the larger cities I am not sure that is the case except for severely outdated units.

It's the land and other non-reproducible privileges, not all form of wealth. The imbalance is not between capital and labor, but land. Land can be in the form of copyright, patents, even domain names, the orbitals in the sky, the electromagnetic spectrum.

Capital can be used to produce more capital, but you cannot produce more land, more electromagnetic spectrum, more orbitals, etc.

The housing crisis is a restriction on what activity are allowed on land, and incentive structure that prioritize hoarding of land over engaging in societal beneficial activities.

I suggest you read up Georgism, the tax ideology that had largely disappeared from political life in the west.

I’m sympathetic to your overall point - I’m not a convinced Georgist but I’m open-minded about the idea - but I’d question some of your specific examples

> even domain names,

With an alternative DNS root, you can have any domain name you like, except for legal constraints such as trademarks, defamation, obscenity, etc. The problem is none of the alternative roots ever took off, in part because the browser vendors didn’t want to get on-board (they saw it as a high risk low reward feature)-and alternative browsers offering that feature failed in the market. This really isn’t comparable to land, in that the scarcity isn’t imposed by the laws of nature or laws written by government, it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market.

> the orbitals in the sky

Orbit is huge and while it is getting more congested, I don’t think that congestion is (as yet) a significant barrier to new entrants. The primary barrier remains the launch costs. The governments of major spacefaring powers don’t see orbital slots as a revenue source, their regulation of them is purely about avoiding conflict, and the fees they charge are about recovering the cost of that regulation, not contributing to general revenue. Some equatorial states tried to claim geostationary orbit slots over their territory as part of their territory, in order to charge for access to them - but the claim failed because the major spacefaring states refused to accept it, and these states lacked the geopolitical power to compel anyone else to take this claim seriously-and, anyway, with the growth of LEO constellations, geostationary orbit arguably isn’t as economically important as it was when those claims were first asserted

> it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market

It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.

What I meant is the network effect enjoyed by Facebook and Amazon. That network effect is ripe for taxation and regulation.

I don’t understand what taxing “network effects” has to do with Georgism though - Georgism argues land should be taxed specially because (1) there is fundamentally a finite quantity of it, (2) it is natural not human-made. Network effects don’t seem particularly similar on either front, and hence even if there is an argument for specially taxing them, that argument isn’t clearly Georgist - a Georgist could consistently reject it.

Closer to land are things like mining rights, water rights, fishing rights, pollution rights - taxing them is an obvious extension of the Georgist idea of land taxation, and it would be difficult for a consistent Georgist to oppose them, at least in principle

At some point, I would imagine the distinction between capital and land becomes blurry, though. Economic rent can be had from either if the barrier to competition is high enough.

Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.

And there is lots of land - just not in close proximity to existing economic activity. It’s a common pattern.

There’s not enough land that has enough water resources.

In the same way, you could build a new city somewhere. Land is expensive near cities.

Isn't housing exactly the most accessible of all the world save for 2-3 totalitarian countries like Oman, in the United States? According to the Numbeo data exactly.

It also has nothing to do with labor vs capital. Billionaires don't invest (much) in housing. Sometimes they do invest in commercial real estate, but never into housing. It's the middle class who buys up everything - now almost exclusively in cash - and then won't leave those houses till death, as Silent generation currently dies.

Yep. It's kind of like with gas prices: Americans, with some of the world's lowest prices complain the loudest. Which appears to point out that the maladies discussed here have less of an economic nature but more of social/psychological/technological.

Maybe the complaining is what keeps the prices low.

Another side of it is that they do indeed spend a bigger fraction of their incomes on both housing and gas. Because they have the biggest houses on biggest plots, plus not just the elite owns separate houses, but most of population - which means they also live very sparsely by necessity, in endless suburbs and exurbs - which in turn means they have to drive a lot - which they do in world's biggest cars. And it's no longer an individual choice because you have to do it to still remain a member of society, and in case of driving, it's either unsafe (too much crime in inner cities) or impossible (no public transport, because dwellings are too sparse making it impractical) to do otherwise.

Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!).

Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".

> Thing is, they do it because they can.

Our parents did, maybe, but we're doing it because we have to.

Inner cities went from unlivable crime dens to highly gentrified in the span of about a few decades. The moment the crime went away, people moved back in. But most of the people who actually show up to town council meetings are the people who grew up seeing riots in LA and graffiti-covered NYC subway cars. So building any more of the now highly valuable high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that inner cities have is a drawn out political fight with people who think making their neighborhood more valuable will ruin it.

And this situation also applied before the last major urban crime wave too. The low-density suburban neighborhoods that are also expensive now used to actually be affordable. You could build cheap housing on low-value land at the outskirts of town and sell it for a huge profit, to people who had extremely generous government loans[0]. This is what triggered the white flight[1] that started the inner city crime wave[2] that Americans now cite as why density is always bad.

Problem is, that's unsustainable, there's only so much land that can be near a valuable set of jobs. So now you have cities where both the high-density core and the suburbs are equally as unaffordable. The next rung on the latter would be to move to smaller cities, except then COVID happened, and suddenly the housing market was flooded with people moving out of San Francisco at the same time rich Chinese people were buying up houses to hide their money from the CCP, themselves in competition with hedge funds like BlackRock that want to buy up entire neighborhoods and rent them back to the people who lived there.

America's obsession with single-family home ownership is an unsustainable system, propped up by deliberate market distortions. We don't buy into it because we're so much richer than anyone else, we buy it because the system is built to make it the only option for most people.

[0] To be clear, nobody would loan you money for 30 years, on a fixed interest rate, and let you pay it back early otherwise. The amount of risk shouldered by the bank is insane, but for the fact that the US government pumps money into banks to make this kind of financing viable to offer.

[1] The peak of suburbanization happened before desegregation.

[2] Don't forget leaded gasoline! Once racial minorities were trapped in cities, we made their kids breathe shittons of lead fumes, creating fuel for the crime wave fire.

Generalizing the entire US like that is nonsensical. This place is huge. Would you compare housing prices in the suburbs of Paris to those in a remote part of the Alps?

There's dirt cheap housing in some very rural places and impossibly expensive housing in several of the major population centers where most people actually live.

Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070.

Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next.

[1] - https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-jap...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop.

No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.

Of course there's a connection. The most realistic reason people go to college is to earn more money later in life. Nobody would ever voluntarily go 6 figures into debt with the understanding that, at the end of it all, the best job they're going to be able to find is to go serve coffee.

And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.

>Of course there's a connection.

A connection, yes, but not a feedback loop. A drop in the value of a degree does not lead to everyone panic-selling their degree.

What you're describing is simple ROI---as the return on the education investment declines, people reduce their investment in degrees. But falling tuition does not further reduce the ROI, as in the case of housing where there is a general expectation of appreciation, and therefore, speculation.

Income is a terrible metric for identifying a developing country. Japan is clearly developed.

Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.

Seems like a baseless claim to me. Even just visually their zoning (or lack thereof) is obviously quite different.

When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

> When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.

Unless… you have a land value tax

The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year! A $200k house in the US is generally considered very affordable. In Japan that's 8 years of salary for half the country, and easily a 20+ year mortgage.

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

shrug. Doesn’t contradict anything I said. Japan is not a developing country.

We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.

Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.

And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.

> In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.

What's their healthcare like? If something bad happens, do they need to rely on savings to pull through, or does their society have stronger social safety nets that allow them to spend their money with less concern?

You know people who regularly say on a weekend evening "Sorry, I can't come, I need to put the $34 I'd have spent into my HSA" ?

It's not really about safety nets since most people don't discount (or account) for them (they're in the future). It's about disposable income, and for huge numbers of Americans, that's in short supply due to the exorbitant cost of housing, college education and health insurance & care.

I know people who don't want to spend $30 on dinner because they already drained their accounts for minor medical problems, yes.

That's precisely what I meant about disposable income.

Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves.

Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff.

Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save.

Lots of people will not go to dinner because they've already had to pay for (... you name it ...)

The first thing I asked about was healthcare. Without the safety net of socialized healthcare, people routinely have to pay for it.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance which (at least theoretically) covers most of their health care costs.

Way too many (many millions) have no insurance or inadequate insurance, but that's a problem we need to fix, not a description of the country as a whole.

The problem for most Americans is that what is not covered by insurance is still too expensive for them, but that's a subtly different problem than "no socialized healthcare => everyone has to pay out of pocket for any healthcare they receive"

Healthcare is pretty good here. Insurance is mandatory and you only pay 30% of the cost.

> they still go out

It's vastly cheaper to go out in Japan, even if there are more expensive options. Not many cheap hangout options in a lot of places.

This is more a function of dense population centers. Having lived in many places, I went out more in the denser areas. There are more options and they are all up and down the price spectrum.

In sparse areas, going to the same few options over and over again isn't fun, and they tend to be more expensive, maybe due to lack of competition.

It's a result of mix-use neighborhoods. In Tokyo your house is usually in the middle of a neighborhood that includes restaurants, shops and other businesses rather than a suburb completely devoid of everything except single-family homes.

This is a big part of it. Or more generally, zoning and the cost of housing (now investments) is behind many socioeconomic issues in 2025.

Don't underestimate the lack of functioning public transport. I always considered trains, tram slow teleporters.

A functional rail network allow the public to move with much less restraint. Think about it. A highly car dependent society which much of the world unfortunately still is, will make going to 3rd places much less attractive. Easier to sit at home, doom scroll and watch Netflix.

Inter city trains should run at least every half hour, reliably.

Fully agree. The MRT in Singapore means you can invite people for a drinking party pretty much anywhere and you know that they'll all be able to attend both cheaply and safely.

Very importantly, with public transport, you don't have to lug this huge metal box around with you, remember where it is, and be sober enough to safely operate it.

You can just go where you like, and if you want to go somewhere else, sure it might not be the strictly fastest option, but it sure is convenient. You can go from A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to grab your elephant box and bring it to D.

>Not many cheap hangout options in a lot of places.

When I stayed in the US for a while, I'm from Germany, what I noticed was is that there's an extreme "upward striverism" when it comes to going out. In most places I stayed you could find dirt cheap bars and clubs (although maybe clubbing overall in the US is worse), but people in their 20s and 30s just seemed to be reluctant to go in a way they're not in Europe or Japan.

I noticed it more with Gen Z than with American millennials, there seems to be an extreme Great Gatsby-ish fake richness.

A bartender in Copenhagen had a long rant about “nowadays, kids look at themselves as brands”, and it’s been stuck in my head. I’m not even that old, but noticed more people think how everything is “cringe”, and wouldn’t want to be seen while doing that activity.

It’s an eventual conclusion of everything having cameras, and thinking of being caught in a TikTok drama. This also tracks how most of the kids nowadays want to become a YouTuber. Which is, basically, being their own brands.

I’m painting with a broad brush here, and there are certainly exceptions, but in my experience what you described has resulted in the only people left patronizing those dirt cheap bars being people who don’t make for good company and not always very pleasant to be around. Which then feeds back into the original issue.

On the other hand those kinds of bars tend to be pretty enjoyable in neighborhoods that are above poverty-stricken but not yet gentrified. Basically a working class neighborhood of old, which rarely exist anymore - or not for long.

I think a lot of this conversation is centered in the US, most other countries haven't been through a suburbanization at the rate and size the US has gone through. It is very easy for you to be disconnected from reality living in the suburbs in florida (where I live, for instance) than it is to do the same in a city like Barcelona or São Paulo.

I don't know of any other country were living in the burbs is desirable, everyone wants to be close to where the action and the businesses are.

Not to pick nits but what is “reality”? How do suburbs disconnect one from it?

You drive everywhere, so it's optimized for drive-through experiences, so you don't have to interact with people. Third places are hard to find, and when they exist, they're paid (movie theaters, restaurants, bars, museums, gyms) and they're not necessarily good places to make friends.

There aren't natural places where you see the same people as the communities are very dispersed, with mostly single-family homes in large lots. So it takes a lot of effort not to be lonely. I've seen many people that moved here from other states/countries and now regret the decision as building community is incredibly hard.

> Third places are hard to find, and when they exist, they're paid

I see this claim a lot but I don't understand it. Can you give me some examples of common third places in other countries that aren't paid that don't exist in US suburbs?

The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out? The public square? The park? The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there? The library? The public pool/baths? The house of worship in walking distance?

I live in a suburb in the US

> The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out?

My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.

> The public square?

The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.

> The park?

My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.

And that's before getting into the public sports facilities and other recreation facilities.

> The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there?

I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.

> The library?

Excellent library with lots of events going on. They're rebuilding the main building after a fire, but even in their temporary space its great. Its usually pretty busy. It has excellent transit and bike paths to get to it, even in its temporary location.

> The public pool/baths?

Lots of city pools. Even one with a lot of water slides, its like a small water park.

> The house of worship in walking distance?

There are plenty of churches in Texas, trust me.

So once again, what's missing? And I'm not in an absurdly wealthy place, my suburb has a pretty average average household income. And its been roughly like this for most places I've lived or stayed at for significant periods of time. Maybe a bit less on transit, that is something my current place is probably a decent bit better than the average US suburb there.

This is speaking from my experiences when I was young.

> My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.

How big is the cul-de-sac? When I was a kid, my 'local neighborhood cul-de-sac' was about 50 kids playing around, forming their own little cliques, learning how to interact with a lot of other different kids. The actual cul-de-sac was more like 200-300 families with kids of varying ages, all interacting with each other

>The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.

How many are spontaneous and unorganized? How often does the local band drop by for an impromptu performance that you didn't need to plan for, find parking for...that you could just be out walking your dog and stop by for a half hour?

> I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.

How much of the market is just your average stay-at-home that is selling their extra produce to make some extra cash and avoid it going to waste? Do you need to sign up to be a seller, or can you just show up, set up at an empty stall and sell your stuff?

> My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.

Wow, 2000 acres...thats, not a whole lot. My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land around it that you could just go and make use of. And that's just in easy walking distance.

> Pools, farmers stands, churches, library...

My hometown had all of these a plenty too, and they weren't all heavily regimented. And by most measures, you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from. Yet, from your descriptions, you can't even manage the most destitute period of the post-soviet-collapse period.

We had plenty of third places to gather around with other people. Parks, beaches, forests. The biggest difference to me was that our experiences weren't sanitized. They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times. Our parents didn't need to plan play dates, or so schedule time off to make sure their kids could experience certain things. Those were just a given. The American experience with this is, speaking from 30-ish years of experience, is very lacking, and the saddest part is that most don't realize that.

> My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land

The city I live in is less than 30 square miles. Hard to have 200 square miles of parks when the town is only 30. And it's entirely surrounded by other cities and towns.

And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.

But I do get that. Where I grew up (another US suburb), walking out my back gate connected to loads of creeks and bayous and woods and ranches.

Still though, goal posts moved even more than 200mi. We went from "there are no parks" to "there are no forests".

> They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times

Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.

> you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from

I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.

> And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.

All of the above. Well, maybe swap baseball fields to basketball courts.

> Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.

If it's anything like my experience in the US, the other side -- hosting such events, is regimented and calendarized.

> I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.

When I was a kid, $3000/annum would have put you in the upper 2-3%.

I've since lived in places with very nice public spaces, what most would consider to be enviable 3rd places. Yet it all still feels so artificial, so made up. It feels designed, not organic, and the behaviours that I observe follow that.

Houstonian here. I’m guessing you’re in Plano. I’ve been all over Texas: cities, suburbs, small towns and many relatives’ and friends’ farms. I’ve also been to most U.S. states and several continents. What you’re describing is such an outlier that’s it literally sounds like a diamond in the rough. While there is hopefully a new trend among American planners to make this more of a reality for more Americans in the decades to come, for many years to come not more than a tiny fraction of Americans will experience what you’re enjoying. Until then, the most common American experience will be to hop in a car to do almost anything. And again, in most corners of Texas and the country, I have rarely seen people sitting on their front porches talking to people passing by - that seems to be a relic of stories I’ve read taking place in certain towns in the early 20th century. But I should come check out your area!

I grew up in Houston (ish, Clear Lake). I've lived in Plano, Far North Dallas, now Richardson. I had friends over a large chunk of the South side of Houston. Pearland, Alvin, The Woodlands, Spring, Friendswood, etc. Their experiences weren't too far off, save for the fact there's practically no transit (same for Clear Lake). Visiting friends inside the loop today, I have pretty similar experiences to what I'm talking about. In the end, still lots of free third places around.

And when I visit friends in San Antonio and Austin, I get pretty similar experiences. Neighborhood grill outs. People chilling in the parks. Excellent libraries around.

> the most common American experience will be to hop in a car to do almost anything

The question was, what were those non-profit/free public third spaces that are allegedly missing. I do agree, in many places there's probably a drive to those things, but they do still exist. And from what I experienced, they're busy.

I’ve lived on both sides of this in different areas of the US. Overall I’d say there’s a lot of places that have what you’ve described, but there are many that don’t, even in more urban locations. Sometimes roads lack sidewalks, parks/skateparks/etc close for repairs but never reopen, local events stop getting funded for one reason or another, or high crime rates make people weary about leaving patio furniture out. All of those contribute to a lack of stable third spaces and associated connections with people.

Other countries have similar issues, of course, but often (not always) they have more cultural factors keeping third spaces alive. In my experience traveling Europe and Africa, community and familial ties generally have a more active role, so there’s just more opportunities for stable third places to develop. It’s not that the spaces are different, imo, but they do seem more common.

HNers don't like to admit that living in the American suburbs with your family is a pretty nice life.

And because you're in America, you can actually earn good money and have more disposable income than Europeans.

For example, outside of college towns, dive bars are almost dead in the U.S. at this point.

Getting cheap drinks with some friends is hardly an option anymore.

My neighbours are my 'reality'. My local plays a big part in connecting me with them. Never seen a newer suburb with a good local. A 'local' in newer suburbs tends to be like other suburban businesses - lacking foot traffic and spontaneity.

Barcelona and São Paulo are quite comparable to cities like NYC or Boston. I imagine people in rural Spain and Brazil also get around via car.

Only slightly related, but I've just found out about Japanese bars nomihodai, or "all you can drink for 2 hours" pricing scheme, and I'm flabbergasted by it. It sounds like it'd lead to incredibly dangerous behavior. I wonder if there's some Japanese cultural thing that makes it safer than it sounds.

Japan indeed does have a cultural thing related to that. It's called "binge drinking."

Japan has a really bad drinking culture, or so I've been led to believe.

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to ...

I just don't get this part in the article and GP. Everyone in the developed country has instant access to ice cream. We don't say "people manage to enjoy $ICE_CREAM despite disgusting abundance of cold desserts". More supply only drives consumption and accelerate consumerism.

And I'm replying here because I have relevant, though anecdotal, memory. Social media is detoxifying Japanese communication at an unbelievable pace over the past decade or two. Japanese lack of social skills and proficiency in verbal abuse used to be otherworldly. Little Sgt. Hartman was just ubiquitous. Not nearly as much as it used to be.

All while mobile televisions, gambling, pornography etc had grown massively, which implies, though not proves, causality. How is that relationship between those supposed to be a "despite"? It just doesn't make any sense. Doing more is learning more.

Japan is an outlier though

Japan averages shorter working hours than the US though - so they literally have more time to go out.

This is NOT true in practice, unpaid overtime is insane and people’s actual work hours are way longer in Japan

So all the statistics are wrong?

To some degree yes, since they don't reflect unpaid overtime, much less de facto overtime (the boss is going out drinking until 1AM, so we're all going out drinking until 1 AM).

I was aware of this particular hidden data, but this thread made me think.

How much is missing from our own historical data? Things understood in the day, but not now, rendering stats less translateable.

Sarariman say yes.

Wow that is possibly the most wildly inaccurate thing I've read in a while.

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