[TulliusCicero]

To be sure, an actually thorough analysis would require firsthand experience (and I have visited Portland at least multiple times). It's just that most US cities are so very terrible at urbanism that it's easy to spot many of the massive flaws from Google Maps.

[dionidium]

Most Midwestern cities are indeed sprawling, pedestrian-hostile, car-philic wastelands and that's what you're going to see on Google Maps. But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods. If you're moving to NYC, then you can throw a dart at the map and you'll land in a walkable neighborhood. If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.

So, look, it's totally fair to say, "I don't want to live in a city like that." But there are people working really hard to make their little pockets better for bikes and pedestrians and so on, and I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on and the extent to which they could be happy in a neighborhood like that, especially when housing is 1/10th the cost.

[TulliusCicero]

> But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods.

Sure, but how useful is that, really? Huntsville has a New Urbanist neighborhood that looks nice and cute, but the rest of Huntsville (which I have lived in before) fucking sucks for anything that's not a car. As soon as you need to go anywhere else, you gotta go back into driving, and only driving.

> If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.

I don't dispute that you can mitigate the effects somewhat via careful selection. But:

* That only works for those particular neighborhoods. You're probably not gonna always stay in those, so you're still going to need to at least own a car, and probably make at least somewhat frequent use of it if you want to go to other places in the area.

* You're probably also looking at other things you want in a neighborhood: crime rate, school quality, restaurants, other points of interest, etc. Having to only look at a few neighborhoods as viable urbanist-friendly locations greatly constrains your options when it comes time to look at the other dimensions.

> I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on

Maybe other people do, but I'm a dorky-ass urbanism nerd who reads blogs on this shit all the time, so I don't. I'm well aware of what's going on. But I also travel enough to know that these cities are so woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world, it would take literal CENTURIES to catch up at the current snail's pace of improvement. Changes that happen after I'm dead are of no use to me.