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Comment by joshyeager | Hacker News Reader

I love suburbia. Living in a city is stressful and crowded. I'd like to live in a rural environment, but then I'd have to drive a very long way to get to work, stores, and entertainment. Living in a quiet suburb gives me the best of both worlds. It's only a 10 minute drive to the downtown library, good restaurants, and other fun stuff. Since I picked a job that's located near my suburb, my commute is also short and avoids highways. And I don't have to fight city traffic or interact with lots of surrounding people in my everyday life.

Sure, I can't walk to ten different restaurants and an art museum, but that's pretty low on my list of wants.

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I'd argue that for most, living in a suburb is in fact the worst of both worlds. You are neither rural nor city. You have none of the benefits and many of the drawbacks.

For me my decision to live in the city is one of safety (driving cars is dangerous) and time. When I lived in the burbs I spent something like 30-40 full days a year sitting in my car. That's 10% of each year in my car. That's just not a trade I'm willing to make anymore.

Funny you mention safety in the city, I often hear about moving to the burbs for safe neighborhoods with sidewalks.

My suburban neighborhood growing up did not have sidewalks; not sure if that was unusual. Overall it's my impression that urban areas are much more walkable/bikeable than suburban ones. At the very least, it's difficult to leave or enter individual subdivisions in the suburbs on foot (by design).

Try going to the grocery store in the suburbs on a bike. Sidewalks are great for walking your dog. But in the suburbs, you are trapped to your car.

You can't walk, take the bus, or ride a bike anywhere. Not only because it's 10 miles away, but because there simply is no safe way to get there without a car.

I live in the suburbs. I ride my bike to work. It's safe enough. People are just scared.

If you're young and reasonably fit, you can pretty much get anywhere. But most people would never consider riding on high speed roads or where there isn't a bike lane.

What is the definition of a suburb to you? There are no areas around nyc considered suburbs where a grocery store is 10 miles away.

Sidewalks have been a feature of every city center neighborhood I've lived in (and I've lived in many). Cities can be safer in that I rarely drive and there are visible and predictable pedestrian street crossing everywhere. While pedestrians do get run over, it's at a far less frequent rate than car-on-car accidents happen.

You're doing it right by living close to your work. Suburbs work well when they're really just small complete cities. Nothing wrong with that.

What I was thinking when I when I wrote "I'm not sure anyone loves suburbia" was that I'm not sure anyone loves that big suburban commute to the city. If that's eliminated, or mitigated by excellent transit connections (ie. pre-automobile street car suburbs), then a lot of negatives go away.

One of the chief advantages of suburban life is cost. I don't like suburbia, but I deal with it because I'm not rich enough to live close to work. Sure, I have the additional cost of maintaining and fueling a vehicle[1], and the stress of a 2+ hour commute each way, but that's far outweighed by housing being 3X cheaper, and the decent public schools (I don't have to pay for private schooling for the kid).

1: which is, really, not THAT much more in terms of cost per mile than using public transportation

> One of the chief advantages of suburban life is cost.

And that's entirely a function of bad city design. When I lived in New York, I lived in a Westchester suburb satellite city over 20 miles away from the city. I had a 35 minute commute by train right to Manhattan. There are tons of such suburbs in Westchester, because they have train lines running through the whole area.

Meanwhile, my parents live in D.C. suburbs that are similarly priced, half the distance out of the city, but where the commuting options are a 1-1.5+ hour drive. In Westchester you've got a little downtown and can walk to shops and restaurants. In the D.C. suburbs you have to drive 20 minutes just to get to the drug store.

It's all about city design.

Indeed, prewar Westchester is one of the few suburbs that isn't an utter abomination, both architecturally and land-use-planning wise. I think that's because they built them before the current bad ideas were in vogue.

And governance. The additional cost of trying to live in a city (Detroit, Baltimore, ...) that is poorly governed is quite high. Most suburbs haven't had the time to become as poorly governed as the cities, so associated costs tend to be lower.

I would not under estimate transportation costs.

Metro Vancouver recently did a study comparing affordability combining both housing and transportation costs. Once transportation was considered, Vancouver City proper dropped to one of the 3 most affordable Metro Vancouver cities, whereas outlying suburbs rose to least affordable. The gap in transportation costs between the cheapest and most expensive areas was several thousand dollars a year, possibly as high as $12k a year.

http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/Pla...

Might depend on the particular metro area. The cost difference between where I live, in the bumblefuck outer suburbs of the Bay Area, vs. a comparable (yet smaller) place closer to most usual tech businesses (either in SF or the Peninsula), is about $3-4K monthly. I've got cost/mile and cost/month records for my car(s) going back 15 years, including purchase price, insurance, fuel, and all maintenance, and it's not even close to $3K/month.

Exactly. It's similar in the Tri-State Area of the Mid-South. Most people in middle class to rich live in the suburbs. Reduces crime, headaches, property costs, etc with only a bit of commute on good Interstates and highways. I paid $550 a month plus $100 utilities for a good, 2-bedroom house that was 20 minutes away from city jobs or fun with 30-40 min away from downtown. Not a bad trade.

Oh, yeah. I definitely agree with that.

I'll second that. The mtn biking trails start at the end of my street and I can bike to town on them. Kayaking is a 1 minute drive. My office is 10 minutes away. I saw a raccoon in my neighbors driveway yesterday and deer in my backyard last fall. It's not a bad life...

The key word in your statement is "drive". I don't want to drive. I want to walk/bike. Driving means I have to get gas, I have to deal with traffic, and I have to find a place to park. I don't want to do any of that.

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