[dougmwne]

There’s no need to wonder. This isn’t a mystery. City planning in the US is totally screwed. No density, single family homes over dense multistory apartments, highways over rail lines, cars over public transit, parking over parks.

Everyone was sold the dream of their own little tenth acre in the exurbs. The end result was a life spent in the car.

[kkfx]

As an European I think USA planning have two issues:

- too dense, yes you read it correctly

- too zoned

Too dense in dense cities means too costly to evolve, that's most an EU problem, but is a USA problem as well in certain areas. Too zoned means to much space between work and living places.

The modern ideal density IMVHO is homes, not apartments, mixed with small (one to three stories max) buildings, shops and so on to allow short-commute (also in bike/feet range) for findings small services (grocery, perhaps a nearby dentist, a gym and so on) and just for some also for work, plus the slice of remote workers (who are perceptually a significant slice of population in developed countries at least) etc.

That's the "dense enough, but not too much" density for a modern economy of scale. We need to mix works and homes, at least for most productive activities, leaving districts just for things we can't do otherwise like certain manufacturing industries, automotive and so on.

[dougmwne]

I’m very skeptical that you have lived in a US suburb with single family homes. They are almost never walkable, have no services except those you drive to and life involves driving from one parking lot of another. Having lived in several EU cities, ideal density to me appears to be 3 to 7 story buildings arranged into city blocks with 20 to 40 businesses within a 1km walk.

[kkfx]

I don't but the issue with US suburbs is that they are residential-only, not mixed with small and medium commercial activities.

Let's say you have a 7 story building, it's typically composed by a certain number of different families (20-30?) with different ideas, agendas etc. Let's say the building start to be aged, time to improve it. It's possible? Hint: no in the mean, just because of it's original design. Let's say remote work became common, but apartments are not large enough to spare a "home office room" per adult inside. What you can do? Buy a room from an old age neighbor who do not need it? A building done in the age where no on-line retail exists, but now we all use it and so we need large external storage to get amazon packages, how can you made it in an already designed building? What about p.v.? Oh, sure the building have a roof, maybe even good for p.v. but it's not enough for ALL apartment self-consumption, so it's just a system to sell electricity not an interesting things technically and in most countries also economically and so on. The point is simple: if you own the land and a light building on it, single owner, a single family inside, it's "easy" change it to adapt to modern needs, a multi-family building is a nightmare.

As a results in certain point in time an apartment is cheaper to buy and run than a home, BUT at another point in time became a nightmare economically and practically. A home can change, so you can keep it up potentially forever.

Since we all need services well, we can't live well in large areas without stores, and that's why US suburbs fails. But in some areas of the EU there are home and small buildings intermixed and they works very well for their residents and in general. I see no reasons why they can't scale. Personally I've left big dense cities for a mounting place in the Alps, a good enough connection (2Gbps/860Mbps FTTH), good roads, enough stores around, a living economical tissue and WFH. It can't scale for let's say automotive industry, but it scale for many kind of other activities.

[greedo]

The problem with achieving this is that business has consolidated too much in the last 20 years. Around me, I have a bunch of small offices (mostly dental/chiropractors, etc) a few gas stations, and then mega stores like Walmart/Lowes etc. On the other side of town, there are megabusinesses like banking and insurance. The company I work for employs over 2K, and that would be pretty difficult to staff with people within walking distance. Thank god my team is allowed to work remotely...

I think that all the talk about modifying city design etc is just unrealistic in the US. You'd need to change regulations, change economic centralization, and most importantly kill the dream of SFH.

[zirgs]

The USA already modified their city design. The cities were much denser before cars were invented. Lots of stuff was bulldozed and converted to parking lots.

In many European cities you can see single family homes next to apartment buildings, offices and shopping malls and it works just fine.

I'm glad that we don't have the same zoning nonsense as in the USA.

[danuker]

On what basis do you call individual homes "ideal density"? I like to have a lot of amenities within 5-10 minutes of walking. That is not quite achievable without apartments.

[vladvasiliu]

Probably noise.

As an apartment-dwelling European, maybe GP's point about density is based on the fact that having neighbors sucks big time. Sure, you can build apartment buildings that are well insulated, but most stock in my neck of the woods isn't built that way. You can hear your neighbor taking a piss at night. Of course, this doesn't help people making the median salary in the city actually afford those places.

So, given my environment, if I want peace and quiet without having to try out living in multiple apartments until I can find the rare one built with care, it's much easier to just go live in a detached house in the suburbs.

Also, despite dense public transport and "walkability", the traffic is still ridiculous so pollution is very high, too.

[dougmwne]

But that’s exactly the point here. Sure, having a nice back garden and a fully detached house is nice. But the price we pay when we build 2 million of those in a metro area is the 2 hour commute, and car culture, and unaffordable housing in city centers. If you have the ability to work from home, then it doesn’t matter that you are 40km from the city center for the rare time you need to attend a meeting or other event. And that’s exactly why folks in the US are so dead set on keeping WFH, their cities are just not designed to allow everyone to reach any arbitrary point in 30 minutes or less.

[vladvasiliu]

I fully agree. And that's why I think that we should somehow push companies to increase WFH where possible, because this doesn't only help the "privileged" who can WFH, but also all the people who actually need to work physically on the job site, by not being compressed in public transit or not waiting for hours on a gridlocked highway. Hell, when the first Covid wave started to wane and the lockdown was lifted, the government "suggested" companies encourage WFH "where possible". Guess what followed? The worst traffic jams Paris had ever seen, since people had to go to the office, but were still afraid of public transit. I understand that Covid hit all of a sudden, and many people didn't have the space to comfortably WFH. But I'm not talking about Paris and it's close suburbs, which tend to have people living in cramped settings. I'm talking about the suburbs further away, which, in most cases, have fairly big houses.

> And that’s exactly why folks in the US are so dead set on keeping WFH, their cities are just not designed to allow everyone to reach any arbitrary point in 30 minutes or less.

I only have a sample size of one, but the Paris region is clearly not great for that, either. And from what I hear, other major French cities aren't any better. And we do have public transit that seems somewhat better than the average US metro (from what I read here on HN, I've never lived in the US). But there are still miles and miles of traffic jams in the mornings and evenings. Trains are still filled to the brim with commuters.

[dougmwne]

Ok yeah I would consider Paris to be an outlier when it comes to the EU because its urban and suburban area is absolutely massive. But imagine you took the entire metro area population of Paris, (12 million) then spread them out across a 100km diameter and removed all semblance of public transit. You would have Los Angeles.

[danuker]

> You can hear your neighbor taking a piss at night.

That is true, I hear the flushing when it's silent, but I don't notice it when I am watching some video, nor does it wake me up. Occasionally the neighbors have a party and I wouldn't be able to sleep, but after 22:00 it's quiet (there are laws about it).

By far the worst source of noise is traffic. I hear vehicles on a nearby street. But even that is better than my parents' detached house with bedroom windows right in the street.

[kkfx]

I call individual homes intermixed with small buildings the ideal density. Like in some (not so much) EU areas, where for instance you have few schools in ~10km (~6 miles) radius, a couple of restaurant, maybe a small grocery shop, perhaps a pharmacy and so on. People still need to travel but being spread there are not much traffic nor parking issues and the ability to integrate remote workers and many in person workers keep the model functional.

When some tech change there is space to change. Let's say there is room for a water-water geothermal heat pump instead of a previous methane combustion based heating, there is room for p.v., domestic charging for cars and so on. Something that can't be done in a dense city.

[zirgs]

It's very achievable in small towns. I grew up in a small town and walked everywhere.