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Comment by mason240 | Hacker News Reader

>20 years from now the strongest predictor of car ownership will be "too poor to live close to mass transit".

I'm sure most people on here realize this, but European cities are the opposite of US cities - poor people live in suburbs outside the city, living in the city is desirable.

If you think the debate over gentrification is interesting now, just imagine what it will look like in US cities where this flip-flop takes place.

I live in the Twin Cities, MN, and see this happening to Minneapolis-St Paul as they seem to be going through this right now

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And that's why I said "in Vancouver". We're a far more European city than most of North America.

The Waterloo region is in the midst of this transition: a huge LRT project on the central transit corridor, along with billions in ritzy new condo developments are shooting up, plus refurbished lofts and such. But a lot of the street-level changes are very much in progress: the main drag is this odd mix of upscale restaurants and yoga studios tucked in between pawn shops, tattoo parlors, and dumpy takeout counters.

Anyhow, we believe in it: We just bought a house a few blocks from a future train stop. If there's a possibility that our present vehicle is the last one we buy, I'd be very happy about that.

This is the big problem in Portland OR and San Francisco -- they can't build housing fast enough in the inner city, and it's pricing out everyone but the rich.

Does anyone actually want to live in inner city Portland? Everything hip seems to be East of the river.

I'd define anything inside of Caesar Chavez (39th) on the east side to be inner city. The property value spike seems to correspond to the areas where biking is as fast or faster than driving to get downtown.

Unless mass transit were to become more convenient than point to point transportation via automobiles I can't see this happening. Those who can afford it will almost always value the convenience and privacy allotted by automobiles. In Europe, the cities were originally built and designed long before automobiles, trains, and streetcars and the resulting layout results in a denser environments where mass transit works better.

You're overestimating how convenient an automobile really is. I made the mistake of taking a job 25 miles away from where I lived, and the resulting hour and a half commute in stop and go traffic was a killer.

I would much rather live in a place where I don't have to drive anywhere. Sitting in traffic is pretty soul-crushing.

"In Europe, the cities were originally built and designed long before automobiles, trains, and streetcars and the resulting layout results in a denser environments where mass transit works better."

Bucharest (Romania's capital) was a typical European city like that you're describing, but it was heavily reshaped (especially in the 1977 quake event) and is continuously worked on both in access infrastructure (extending and improving) and real estate development, and they somehow manage to keep it both automobile friendly and convenient for the the rest. The automobile possession here gets more of a whim than a necessity, as the public transportation covers literally everything, even at night! This isn't that much a mater of how things tend to fit naturally, as it is cultural. I get the impression that in USA they go lengths to keep things in a state where you have to need a car.

Light rail runs quite far into the suburbs these days, and that's going to increase when the red line gets built out.

It's probably moot for me as I currently work in the suburbs (West Bloomington) but even if I did work downtown or in north loop with the rest of the SV wannabes I doubt very much that city living would be a compelling option when compared with a suburb house or apartment nearby a light rail stop.

I don't think most people on HN realize this.

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