Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a child of the suburbs and have since moved to the city so take this with a grain of salt.

I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I enjoy driving on the giant roads, or strolling through the quiet suburbs with headphones on without fear of some incident. I like not hearing people and cars all the time.

I like the city for other reasons; I enjoy the history, the character, the feeling of life, but the suburbs have their place, there is a reason they exist. They aren't perfect and they are the harbingers of some negative social trends, but they aren't as horrible as HN likes to act.

View on HN

> I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which is some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I don't understand this. That is not because you're not lucidly explaining it. It simply does not fit into my head how this is desirable. :) But that's ok. I think Different places should look and feel and act different. I think that making a consistent experience absolutely destroys the unique culture and history of places, replaced by "the style from headquarters", and "the history of Walgreenmartsafewayco". It really repels me.

For really getting away from people/cars, I believe that the forests are appropriate. Ideally, no paths, no trails, just.... away.

Anyway. My anti-suburb rant over for the day. :)

> I think that making a consistent experience absolutely destroys the unique culture and history of places

To be fair, the unique culture of the place used to be "industrial farming corn field" is most cases. It's not like anyone is tearing down 100 year old neighborhoods to build big boxes to serve suburbs (actually, the suburbs are far more likely to save those places than destroy them).

> unique culture of the place used to be "industrial farming corn field" is most cases.

Ha, yes. But - thought experiment. What if, instead of another 'burb with winding streets, it started out by defining a downtown core kind of setup: 4-6 story buildings with retail storefronts and apartments above. Put the 'extra' space into a commons area, plus maybe a mini-park possibly with original area flora and fauna. So your 1/4 mile x 1/4 mile place gets a lot more dense and has a lot more to offer within an easy 10-minute walk. Bonus points if you figure out how to build a "tool shed" local workshop to replace the ubiquitous garages. :)

I would live in something like this happily, but for one thing: I have three large dogs. Without a yard, it's a lot of work, and I'd hate to think I couldn't keep a few dogs around.

Now that the suburbs people want to move to the city with all of their square footage, they're destroying my 100 year old neighborhood, bulldozing Victorian and Craftsman homes to build zero lot-line homes in their places.

It makes me want to throw up. Every time the council pushes for a Historic Overlay, it turns into a revolt with Tea Party style propaganda.

On the other hand, I don't really see the need for stores to be unique. I go to stores to buy things. If they have what I need, that works for me. I think it's easy to associate big box stores with the ones that people tend to dislike, but there are also high quality places like Wegmans that are still big box, suburb-y stores.

It seems that much of the suburb vs. city debate comes down to culture and personal preference.

Most areas don't really have very interesting or unique character worth preserving. Suburbs aren't built in interesting areas for the most part. Unless some local industrial corn farm or poverty stricken country town who's claim to fame was being near a rail junction (no longer used) is unique or interesting or worth preservation.

One of the reasons for the economic dominance of big box stores over quaint mom and pop shops is simple economics. Small store usually don't offer the best prices or selection. It's only at the weird long end of the tail can they exist, selling stuff that's not of a big enough general interest for the big stores.

"I like walking among glaciers, however, no matter how much I do enjoy that, glaciers are going extinct in certain parts of the world and there is nothing I can do about that. I may wish to believe otherwise and there may not be much of a visible change on a day-to-day basis, however, those glaciers are going extinct, even if there are some years they get bigger."

The point of the article is that suburbs are fundamentally flawed in that the tax base cannot keep up with the costs of the infrastructure once that patch of suburbia has gone past the growth phase. There simply isn't the density of tax payers to pay the bills. Raising taxes is not an option as people are mobile and will move to a more sensible city arrangement if the dream of suburbia is out of their price bracket. The developers will move to the city too.

Not mentioned in the article is the eventual problem of serious resource depletion, i.e. when every bit of America has been fracked, every Arctic wildlife refuge plundered for oil and the Red Sea pumped into the Saudi desert to get the last gasp of light, sweet crude. We no longer talk about 'Peak Oil' any more (wasn't that just grey propaganda put out by the oil companies to make their product worthy of a high price or am I being over cynical there?), however, there is no denying that suburbia can only exist so long as there is cheap and affordable motoring. When motoring starts to get much more expensive that is going to dent those wallets that pay the taxes to maintain suburbia so a lot of America is going to face the same problems of diminishing tax base that Detroit is famous for. I would not be one to bet that everyone will be driving a Tesla in between their teleconferences on the i-glasses by the time we get to that stage of the game.

Anyway, enjoy the suburbs by all means, along with millions of others including myself, but do appreciate that they are not entirely economically viable as the situation stands and, if there is a serious problem with ye-olde-petroleum-reserves, then suburbs will be very different to how they are now.

I totally get that it can be desirable to some. The problem is that sprawling suburbs are not only bad for the environment, they are financially unsustainable with current financing schemes. They will scale back. The nicest ones will stay forever if some are willing to pay for them.

"I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available"

I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.

This really shows up in food. I always cringe when my suburban friends just rave over the meal they had at Maggiano's. There is just so much more in the world to discover outside the comfortable safe world of chain restaurants.

That probably sums up the whole suburban experience to me. Comfortable, safe, predictable, beige. As someone who craves adventure (fwiw, I'm edging closer to 40) I just crave the authenticity a city or even a great small town provides. Suburbs really are just a bad compromise between those two things, the worst of all possible worlds.

This depends a little on the area and culture. Certainly there's always less variety in a suburb, but there's sometimes good quality and interesting things, there's just not the variety.

Or maybe the places I'm thinking of are "great small towns"? What would you call Pleasanton? (I think it's pretty clearly a suburb, and not terribly much more, though certainly it didn't start out that way...).

Pleasanton the town center? That's a fantastic spot and works very much as a small town. The issue is that bulk of the residents live in suburban (well really exurban) subdivisions well away from it. Their day-to-day is very much just a standard suburban experience, even if there is a lot to love n the actual town center.

People tend to think of "urban" as "City of San Francisco (Manhattan, Chicago, etc...)" To me urban is much of a characteristic. Many suburbs have a relatively urban component at their core. If you live on an actual city grid (no windy streets) with strong mixed uses (that you can walk to) throughout your neighborhood then you're living an urban existence in my book. Or at least non-suburban.

I can definitely identify with people living in central Pleasanton, but you don't have to get far outside the center city before it falls off the rails.

Seems like a reasonable perspective.

Can't wait until automated cars and 24/7 same-day delivery make all those things pointless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com