[homerhomer]

We just recently moved from a city to the burbs. Our choice was multi-factored. It was price of a bigger house, better schools, less congestion and crime.

My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people, but it got cramped when my son was born. We looked into expanding but for the cost of adding a room with a bathroom ($100k) we decided that it wasn't worth it.

With schools we got lucky, the elementary school was just recently built and looked great. But there was an issue, the schools that my son would be going after grade school were rated very poor. This was a concern.

Traffic bad and seemingly only getting worse. Traffic projects have been in endless gridlock between car commuters and the bicycle community.

Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately. Gone are the days of how clean our city is and now it's just littered with trash and tent communities. It's not uncommon to see a heroine needle if walking in a city park. In the last year, we had somebody try to break into my shed and my wife and 4 years old Son were confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.

I still have a soft spot for PDX and I think it's a great place, but we decided get out.

ha ha sounds like I'm repeating the same story of earlier genereations, ha ha nothing new.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/our-city-has...

[kartan]

> My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people

That is 80m2. I grew up in a 75m2 apartment (810sf) with my parents and two brothers.

I guess that "cramped" is a matter of perspective. :)

> Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately.

It makes me sad to hear about that. We are in the XXI century and we have good ways of helping homeless people and reduce crime. I understand that you leave to a better place, but that does not solve the problem.

> confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.

I hope that you have find a good place for you and your family but do not forget the people that you left behind. Their lives are a tragedy that can be averted.

[afthonos]

> That is 80m2. I grew up in a 75m2 apartment (810sf) with my parents and two brothers. I guess that "cramped" is a matter of perspective. :)

Also a matter of layout. The expected amenities in US apartments live little room for living space, particularly pantries and walk-in closets, and large appliances. Large bathrooms are also common. Having just moved to Europe, I am acutely aware of the trade offs; we have a lot of living space, but we also have had to buy wardrobes, get used to a much smaller bathroom, and generally adapt to different expectations.

[closeparen]

I often wondered while seemingly 20% or more of a small apartment's floor plate would be dedicated to the bathroom. Turns out the answer is simple: ADA requirement.

[benj111]

Built in wardrobes are a thing. More space efficient than a separate wardrobe. I've had them in half my prior rentals.

[vinay427]

For some anecdotal evidence, I've never seen an actual walk-in closet in Switzerland or Spain where I've traveled and/or lived so far, though I'm sure they may exist somewhere.

[pwagland]

To be fair, a builtin wardrobe is different to a walk-in wardrobe. The latter _tends_ to be builtin, the former tends be built into "the space between walls". I'm not 100% sure I would call them more space efficient, however they don't poke out into the room, and so you end up two rectangular rooms, and with their wardrobes next to each other, as opposed to two non-square spaces with the wardrobes (typically) backing onto each other. So you typically end up with extra usable space.

A walk in robe on the other hand typically wastes space since it (in effect) introduces a new hallway into your house, since that is effectively what the wakling area in your walk-in robe is.

[dccoolgai]

It would be kind of selfish to put the burden of "fixing societal problems" on a little kid. You're _most_ responsible for your children, full stop. Doesn't mean you stop trying to help, but trying to make OP feel bad for making a choice for the safety if their family is pretty weak.

[adreamingsoul]

I think this comparison is interesting. I recently relocated to Norway from Portland, OR and find the design and use of space in Oslo to be excellent. However the way space is utilized back in Portland isn’t that efficient and/or is poorly designed.

[noobermin]

The same force that enables suburbs is the same force that leads to wasted space in America: cars, cheap oil, and large swathes of land.

[microcolonel]

Also extremely intrusive urban planning, which put into place minimum parking capacity, minimum house sizes, single-family dwelling zones in the middle of what should have been highly developed cities, residential neighbourhoods with no commercial space (and thus very few amenities), etc..

[kartan]

> Also extremely intrusive urban planning

I agree partly.

In most European cities there is a lot of planning and regulations to follow. Barcelona Example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample) is an example of 19th-century planning.

In most Europe, you can't build a tall building in a rural town, a skyscraper without the proper open space around it or a factory in a residential neighbourhood. But, those rules have been more sensible to the city needs and have had less pressure from car makers. Old towns are usually compact and easy to walk because they predate cars. Cities have very good public transportation systems as cars were too expensive for most of the population. Living in the city centre has been seen as a luxury. At least for me, "suburvio" (a suburb in Spanish) has always had a negative connotation. Nobody wanted to live in the outskirts of a city.

So, I agree that American cities are, in general, poorly designed. And public transportation is almost nonexistent. The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans. Carmakers had too much power for too long. Urban planning worked really well to achieve its goal: to sell more cars.

[microcolonel]

> The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans.

That is part of urban planning here. Public transit simply can't be both good and cheap at these densities, which were mandated explicitly by urban planners. You complain about height limits, but there are many places which you can't (or recently couldn't have) house more than one family in a certain amount of space by law.

There are lots of post-car places where you can get around great on foot, it's just that a lot of the post-car places in the U.S. and Canada have many layers of planning and regulation which make you dependent on a car.

[irrational]

We live in a suburb of Portland. To be honest, Portland itself has become so terrible that we have not set foot in the city in over 5 years. 10+ years ago the city was amazingly clean and beautiful. The last time I visited it was so filthy and overrun with needles and homeless camps that we haven't returned since.

[galago]

Portland was never, ever "clean and beautiful" and its a weird lie to suggest that its gotten worse. Its actually better today than its ever been.

[kthejoker2]

This is interesting, two truth-orthogonal comments.

As someone who has never been to the city - not 20, 10, or 0 years ago - how should I go about verifying which one is "more true"?

[ikeyany]

Both can be true. Portland has some nasty parts (inner downtown, anywhere near a trail or a body of water) that are riddled with needles or feces, but there are also some very nice parts like the suburbs or anywhere that can afford private security.

[loco5niner]

I live just outside Portland, and the homeless problem is MUCH worse here than it was 10 years ago. For one more data point....

[jcims]

My quick hack for plausibly quantifiable info is to do a google image search and scan through the charts to find a trend.

[ff10]

Take a guess.

[drdeadringer]

For my own clarity: Do you intend more of a "flip a coin" meaning or more of a "we should inherently already know what the answer is" meaning?

My density today is more than average.

[rayiner]

I don’t know if that last bit is completely true. Portland was worse on my last visit earlier this year than it was on my first visit almost ten years ago. On the other hand, my wife grew up in Oregon and from her account, the city was dirty and full of drug addicts when she was growing up in the 1990s.

[microcolonel]

Now the mayor is also giving Antifa full license to harass and disrupt with impunity. Every couple months they'll come out and start disrupting and redirecting traffic because they feel like feeling powerful. This has now been going on for a few years.

[malandrew]

I would also add that the mayor and police force are doing nothing to address the increasing lawlessness. The situation with antifa injuring a journalist is a perfect example.

[fred_is_fred]

It's almost like every generation complained about the suburbs being boring and then had kids and figured out why suburbs exist. This comment could have been written any year since the early 1900s.

[lordgrenville]

The economist Edward Glaeser, despite being a big fan of cities (he wrote a book called Triumph of the City), ended up moving to a suburb. In addition to the reasons you mentioned, he cited America's ridiculous federal home mortgage interest deduction, which incentivises spending more on a bigger home, with obvious negative outcomes (environmental and otherwise).

[throw0101a]

> ... he cited America's ridiculous federal home mortgage interest deduction, which incentivises spending more on a bigger home, with obvious negative outcomes (environmental and otherwise).

Canada does not have such an interest deduction and has roughly the same home ownership rate as the US.

(What Canada does have is no capital gains tax on one's primary residence, so any profits when selling are tax free.)

[hackeraccount]

The mortgage interest deduction doesn't incentivize getting a bigger home. Or even a more expensive home. It does incentivize getting a bigger mortgage. Frankly you can borrow a lot to buy a place in the city or in the suburbs.

[throw0101a]

> It does incentivize getting a bigger mortgage.

Most people probably buy the maximum they can "afford" (are approved for).

[lordgrenville]

Sure, but the more expensive the home, the bigger a mortgage you can take.

[pmoriarty]

What I've often wondered is why there aren't more homeless people in the suburbs.

[x0]

Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.

Usually. I live in a semi-rural town (Katoomba) in Australia, about 100km from the biggest city, and we have a lot of homeless people from rural towns, people who have lived their lives in the country. Turns out my town is as close to Sydney as they're comfortable being, there's good services for them with a big hospital, accommodation, a train line etc.

[jasode]

>Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.

Exactly. In the USA, the downtown area of cities might have a van driving around with meals to distribute to homeless people on the sidewalks. The homeless don't even have to walk to a soup kitchen; the vans bring the food to them. Some downtowns also open a shelter of "last resort" when the winter temperatures drop to inhuman freezing conditions. In downtown Vancouver during a record-breaking winter, I saw a city van driving around asking the homeless if they needed a warm place to sleep for the night.

In contrast, the suburbs will not deliver meals nor will suburban residents open their homes to random homeless vagrants. The town councils of suburbs also don't usually vote to spend tax dollars and open up a soup kitchen and shelter in their neighborhood. They don't want their neighborhoods to be attractive to the homeless.

Being homeless is already a hard life but it would be an even harder existence in the suburbs.

[nkoren]

For a start, in many American suburbs, just walking to get food can be a four hour round trip. And a four hour round trip to do absolutely anything else. Without a car, that's totally untenable. You may or may not have anything better to do with the time -- but there's definitely no way you can spare the calories.

[dajohnson89]

need a car to do anything in the suburbs, really. hot take: this isn't a coincidence

[asark]

This is explicitly a reason some people in the suburbs don't want public transit to expand out to them. Some'll tell you. No public transit effectively puts a floor on how bad things can get, crime-wise, school-wise and, therefore, property-value-wise (each feeds back into the others, of course). Provided the property starts out pretty expensive, anyway—obviously doesn't apply to the actual sticks.

[jcims]

This isn’t exactly an unfounded principle.

[irrational]

We had a homeless person living in a car on our street (in a Portland Oregon suburb). Some neighbor called the cops and they would come around and tell him to move on. He would be gone for a few days and then come back. Rinse and Repeat for about a year until we took him dinner on Thanksgiving day. The next day he was gone and never returned. It was the strangest thing.

[harlanji]

I unexpectedly became homeless a year ago in SF and I notice that I disappear from places as soon as I interact with someone beyond politeness, like tell them details of my situation. I avoid it but when they take interest my social programming kicks in and I feel kind of sick after. Grocery stores, cafes I go to for months never feel safe after a conversation. Sleeping without shelter is incredibly vulnurable.

[danny_taco]

This is fascinating. Can I ask your reasoning behind this behavior?

[dajohnson89]

he/she is afraid of being judged, snitched on, stigmatized, kicked out, etc.

[lr4444lr]

The ubiquity of the affordable automobile due to Henry Ford powered the rise of the suburb. Not the other way around.

[noobermin]

google "white flight"

[mymythisisthis]

Sadly its become real again. Cities were starting to pick themselves up. Now this new generation is doing exactly what their parents did, run away. It is not a 'woke' generation.

Ironically, if you can afford it, cities are better than suburbs for schools etc. You can have two layers of people in exactly the same place and never have them interact. The richest and poorest schools are just blocks apart.

[itsameta4]

>if you can afford it

We can't, that's why we're moving. It's not to get away from "elements", like prior generations. It's simply too expensive to raise a family in the city. Not to mention, if you moved into the city, your family support structure is likely to be back home.

[username90]

People call the cops on them. Happened once to one of my friends who had a big beard and baggy clothes so he could be mistaken for homeless.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm surprised about the education aspect. I thought education tends to be better in cities than outside.

[jcims]

In the US anyway cities tend to have the best private education and the worst public education.

[toasterlovin]

You know how large organizations tend to be poorly run and non-responsive to their constituents? Well, large cities have large school districts, whereas suburbs have small school districts...

[cafard]

According to https://www.niche.com/k12/search/largest-school-districts/m/..., Fairfax County (Virginia) has 187 thousand students, Montgomery County has 159 thousand, and the District of Columbia has 48 thousand.

My impression is that the size of suburban districts varies greatly by state. Of those I am acquainted with, in Colorado, Maryland, and Virginia every county or county-equivalent city has one school district. In Pennsylvania there can be several school districts in a county, some small enough to have one high school. I think that New Jersey is very fragmented also.

[toasterlovin]

On the west coast it seems like school districts often only cover a single city. Here are the lists for Washington, Oregon, and California. There are tons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Wa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Or...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Ca...

[cafard]

Interesting. Of course, there are some really sprawling counties out west, e.g. San Bernardino County.

[lonelappde]

How is the commute in the suburbs?

[scruple]

I walk from my bedroom to my office. It's brutal.