[hibikir]

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.

When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places to sit everywhere, things to see, other people walking too. He could even go to the beach and be fine, as there's lifeguards. By the second week of the summer, you'd see group of new friends hanging out with no parents, just going back home for meals and sleep.

Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.

[antiframe]

100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.

[AnthonyMouse]

> But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs.

That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities.

And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.

But then more people can't move into the city, even if they want to, because the units in urban environments are already occupied and converting more land to urban developments is restricted by law. So the existing units get bid up until the price difference is high enough to deter people from living in the city and everyone else has to live in suburbs or rural areas whether they want to or not.

[throw0101c]

> And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.

The existing "city" was the suburb of the past:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

* https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middl...

[eloisant]

The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars.

You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.

[petsfed]

I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.

You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.

[bombcar]

You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.

[petsfed]

The funny thing about the big box stores is that they can apply so much pressure to their suppliers (and their landlords) that the price difference outstrips differences in quality and convenience.

Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon residents who are too cool for such a mainstream store. Despite the higher costs, I vastly preferred shopping at Market of Choice because I could easily walk there and the food was generally higher quality. Generically, I would consistently shop at stores I could bike or walk to, outside of that shopping center, and frequent restaurants I could get to.

Meanwhile, where I live now, there's a Haggen (an Albertson's branded Whole Foods competitor) across the street from a Safeway (which is the brand Albertson's uses in this particular market for their standard store). They carry identical store-brand items, but the premium store charges 5-10%, because they know that people will pay more just for a better shopping experience.

Obviously I don't speak for everybody, but I think a lot more people would accept paying a little bit more in exchange for not driving so much, but part of the problem is that, thanks to market effects and economies of scale and so on and so forth, they have to pay a lot more, for the same products.

[nicoburns]

Isn't the issue that there are zoning laws preventing the conversion of the suburbs into more city?

[ghaff]

Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute. Those dynamics have doubtless changed to some degree. But, if I had to commute daily to the nearest large city, I'd seriously consider living there. But I don't have to so I live rurally/exurban or whatever you want to call it.

[NoLinkToMe]

For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules.

And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.

My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).

So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.

[ghaff]

I guess.

I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much.

I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree.

Of course, different people have different preferences.

[ryandrake]

Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.

[throw0101c]

> Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute.

Commute time has been 30 minutes for a large portion of human history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.

[antiframe]

A 30 minute commute by foot, where one passes interesting architecture, parks, is under the shade of trees, can pop into the corner store to get extra milk on the way home (2 minute detour), etc is far more pleasant than a 30 minute commute by car, surrounded by other cars on a seven lane highway with billboards.

Quality matters just as much as quantity, and often more when they're close together. (I would of course prefer a 10 minute drive to a 90 minute walk, for example).

[throw0101c]

Tell that to the folks that have built most of America in the post-WW2 era.

[ghaff]

I don't really disagree. One hour each way starts to seem like a lot. 30 minutes isn't walking next door or downstairs but seems pretty doable in general. Even within a large city with decent public transit, it's not hard to get up to close to a half-hour commute to get into an office. Most people who don't work from home don't live a 5 minute walk from their workplace.

[bluGill]

Historically people had to work on a farm! The vast majority of the historical population lived close enough to their fields to walk to it every day. Sure Rome had a million people 2000 years ago, but that was only possible because many many millions of people (often slaves and thus not seen much in history) who didn't live in Rome and produced a surplus of food.

[enaaem]

Farms were always placed as close to the city as much as possible, because it is impractical to transport food from a distance. An ox-drawn cart isn't faster than walking speed, so farmers still had to live a walkable distance from the city market.

Historic cities and castles are almost always wrongly depicted in movies. They are always placed in a grace field in the middle of nowhere, but there should be farmland everywhere.

[Andrex]

In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."

[lopis]

This take makes no sense, if you take into account that 100 families could live in the space of one single detached home. High density building isn't suddenly going to take over suburbs like that.

[gsinclair]

That’s a huge exaggeration. Tall buildings require a much greater footprint than a single detached home.

Knock down three adjacent homes and you can get maybe 6-8 levels, which would be no more than 40 families.

[hsiudh]

Have you been to any place other than the US? The size of a single detached home, including backyard, front lawn and sides can perfectly fit an entire 5-8 story building of two 80m2 apartment per floor, if not more. If you live in a well designed city with public transport, you don't need to waste surface area on a parking garage.

[tpdly]

Average density in an urban core (North America) is like 90 residents per acre, vs like 5 res/acre in suburbs. Not a very big exaggeration

[dummydummy1234]

Population is generally stable or declining out side of the developing world.

Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.

[MostlyStable]

It's declining nearly everywhere except for some portions of Africa (where the trend is also towards lower fertility. I'm not aware of anywhere that is both "stable" (~2.1) and has a flat trend; that is to say that it isn't just momentarily passing through stability on it's way to declining population.

[bluGill]

That cannot happen. Cities need a lot of "empty" space around them for farms. Well I suppose everyone could move to Spain (picking a random country) and leave the rest of the world to robotic farms. However we can't expand to cover even all of Spain unless everyone is living in a mega suburb with everyone having their own single story mansion.

(others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)

[HomeDeLaPot]

There are many types of houses in between suburbs and skyscrapers. This is "missing middle" housing. Duplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings, etc. Look at Old Town Alexandria, VA on Google Street View, for example.

[nayuki]

> lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent

This is impossible. Look at even the densest cities today such as Hong Kong, with many 50-storey buildings packed closely. HK as a whole has maybe 25% land area allocated for buildings and the rest is forest and green space.

Or consider Tokyo - sure, it is a big sprawling metropolis and pretty much an uninterrupted patch of concrete. But the urban area does eventually end, and much of the land area of Japan is mountains, forests, farms, etc.

[mapt]

In what extremes? "Extrapolate this forward through five hundred years of exponential population growth that is not in evidence"?

[api]

I like to put it this way:

The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets.

I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."

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

This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.

Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there.

I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about.

Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."

Suburbs not only aren't required for this, requiring them to be suburbs actually makes it worse.

Suppose you have 1000 parcels of land and you need 3000 housing units. Obviously you need an average of three units per parcel. If 950 of the parcels are zoned to allow only one unit, the remaining 50 parcels then need to have an average of 41 units each.

Those parcels then become dramatically more expensive because they're the only place additional units can be added. Rents then have to rise to reflect the higher costs. Worse, some of those parcels already have e.g. 30 units but the cost of demolishing a perfectly good 30-unit building to build a slightly larger one is prohibitive, so now there is a shortfall and even the one-unit-per-parcel land ends up with higher rents.

[throw0101c]

> I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." […] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.

I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?

[dTal]

My reading is that in the suburbs you typically buy, while in urban environments you typically rent because all the land is already owned by someone who is making a killing off it; they aren't going to sell because that would be slaughtering the golden goose. And that prevents almost everyone who isn't a landowner from getting ahead, because as soon as you figure out a way to make a surplus, poof the rents go up and absorb it. Oh sure, individuals who perform better than average might be able to press their advantage; but class movement is impossible because it is always "priced in".

I am not sure that this phenomenon is unique to cities, in fact, but rather an inevitable endgame to the idea of owning land in perpetuity. It creates a permanent class divide.

[amanaplanacanal]

I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate.

Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.

[bombcar]

> Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.

Over time, real estate just is inflation - if it's more than inflation it eventually ends up infinitely expensive and unaffordable, if it's less than inflation it leads to cheap-as-free.

Arguably the second is more desirable from a human standpoint - but the first is where financialization leads us.

[throw0101c]

> I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate.

How does urbanism lock people out of owning real estate?

[crooked-v]

> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else

Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.

[trgn]

i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere.

i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to.

the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ...

it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target.

i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.

[buellerbueller]

i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs.

i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.

[trgn]

i agree it's overestimated, and it's not "as bad" as many believe it to be. but it is worse.

i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.

am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.

there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.

[bombcar]

The "yearly pizza shooting" is as absurd to some people as "the town rapist" would be to others.

There doesn't seem to be anything mandatory about cities having proportionally more crime.

[sarchertech]

There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s.

But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.

Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.

So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000

[Aeolun]

Surely that’s just because people go to drink in the city center? 1 out of 1000 violent drunks sounds like a pretty reasonable ratio.

[mothballed]

People aren't statistical machine, they make judgements based on their life experiences. I've lived in at least half a dozen inner Midwest cities in the ghetto poor cores and I would describe the experience as basically "stay strapped or get clapped hellscape." People trying to rob me at gunpoint (yes happened), stealing my bikes and whatever they can find outside, testing you and sizing you up to see if you're a good mark, etc etc. On one occasion I got a flat tire and the gats immediately came out once they saw my white face; I guess they respected the fact I decided to fight back with my hands because for whatever reason they decided not to shoot me.

So yeah maybe the statistics say something else (I wonder how many people like me just don't report crime -- the police do nothing in such places) but I'm not eager to relive that experience.

That said your immediate neighbors in these areas can be incredibly nice and protective of each other as a survival mechanism, because everyone else is quite literally out to get you.

[buellerbueller]

This story just doesn't add up.

[bluGill]

In the US the city is not a safe place for kids. Great for the 21-30 year old crowd (and older folks that didn't "grow up") since there are many great bars and parties, but there are no kid friendly places. I know several people out here in the suburbs who loved city living until they had kids. One kid under 5 isn't too bad, but as soon as the kid is school age you look at how bad the schools are and you get out thus ensuring nobody will try to fix the problem.

[dgacmu]

That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids. (Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.

[jghn]

A large problem in discourse like this is relative terms. Specifically what people consider to be "city" or "urban" vs "suburban" vs "rural".

I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.

[ghaff]

And part of the problem in the US is that the US census has a very binary definition: urban and rural. Myself and two neighbors live on about 100 acres (not counting adjacent conservation land). We're considered urban. because we're about an hour drive of a fairly large city.

But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.

[hylaride]

No kid friendly places? Like parks, museums, their school (I admit public school quality can vary enormously in urban areas in the US), bakeries, candy stores, etc all within a 20 minute walk for me? If all one sees in urban areas is bars and parties, maybe it is the people that leave that don't grow up.

My daughter has slept under the shark tank at the aquarium as well as with the mummies at the local cultural museum. The local university runs summer camps for everything from engineering to gymnastics. The Museums run programs, too. Her grade school has a thriving parent community because the parents stand together when school is let out instead of forming a long line of cars, I've made new friends myself this way (the number one complaint I get from parents that do move out is that they know no other parents in their kid's school). Because I walk everywhere, I don't ever deal with traffic.

I'm not saying it's perfect, either. Urban areas vary a LOT, including within any single city and within the country. My child's been directly exposed to poverty, homelessness and mental health issues, etc. I'm comfortable enough to explain the complexities of this to her, but some people would rather not.

This is not to criticize people who want to live in a rural or suburban life. I grew up in a small town and got myself out of there very quickly, mostly because I felt isolated and trapped growing up. But cities are very much places you can live in, kids and all.

[aftbit]

Which city? IMO having public transit and good sidewalks would be amazing for older kids in the 12 to 16 range. I grew up in a small suburb, connected to the world only by a busy 40 mph street without sidewalks. I was basically trapped at home unless I could convince my parents to take me somewhere until my friends started getting cars when I was 16 or 17.

[seanmcdirmid]

I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.

[dyauspitr]

Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.

[skandinaff]

This. I do remeber as a kid in the 90s, who was among the first who got a confuser at home - at age 5..6 I remember actually being pulled to my apartment, to play all those DOS games I had (didn't have game console, but a pentium PC, with windows 95/DOS). At some moment, I remember even being thrilled to spend my time playing jazz jack rabbit or something of sorts, instead of going downstairs to my apartment block yard (was living in ex-ussr space) which at the time was full of kids playing. It is not anymore. This memory makes me sad now, what a waste of childhood. At least, I got to experience, playing with sticks and stones with other kids, and navigating DOS file system as a 6 year old.

[close04]

I think back of my childhood and playing the usual games like hide and seek with at least 10-12 other kids around my building and occasionally I'll slip into the "kids these days" thoughts. And then I realize I had something no kid these days has: massive amounts of boredom.

There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.

Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?

[skandinaff]

So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.

[krzyk]

I had similar experiences (post-communist country), but I was a bit older, got my first computer at age of 9 (Atari 65XE, replaced with C64 2 years later).

So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.

But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.

[fatnoah]

As a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was FORCED outside by my parents. The same was true for other kids in the neighborhood. We were told that chilling indoors was not an option, so get outside and be back by the time streetlights come on or at least call to say where we were.

[smcg]

My friends and I got yelled at for doing anything fun outside, and we couldn't go beyond our yards. Then the neighbor kid chased my friend with a knife and we really couldn't go anywhere until the little perp got committed.

[naasking]

> Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring.

The inside wasn't boring so much as parents didn't want their kids inside and requiring attention or supervision. TVs, tables and gaming consoles means they can be inside without this burden, so it became an easy default.

[gosub100]

Me and my friend in the 90s dug a fucking HOLE in the back yard because we were so bored. We got it down to about 5 feet, probably just enough to be dangerous.

This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.

[sylens]

This is key. As a kid I still wanted to play sports outside because the sports video games were pretty limited

[bluGill]

There are a lot less kids as a % of the population. My mom growing up in the baby boom had to stand in the aisle of her school bus (something safety doesn't allow anymore), but if she got on the bus just 4 blocks sooner she could have got an empty seat! These massive numbers of kids don't exist and so there isn't much to play with.

My kids are happy that the corn fields around our how turned into a subdivision just after we moved in because now there are kids to play with. However only about 1 in 10 houses have a kid (some have grandkids over on weekends - I didn't count that, and others were the kids live with the other parent half the time get counted half).

[ryandrake]

My suburban neighborhood has ~100 houses, and only two of them (besides mine) have children in them. Lots of grandparents, though, who briefly have children over around holidays. The landscape is dotted with parks but they're all pretty much always empty, except for the occasional adult exercising or walking their dogs. Our local school district is spread out over a huge swath of suburban land, likely because there are just not enough kids.

It's probably different in the city, where presumably more people are parent-aged. Almost all homeowners I know out by me are over 45 and their children are adults by now.

[flakeoil]

Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?

[swiftcoder]

It'd be better if there were better 3rd spaces, sure, but hanging out at the mall with friends is still better than sitting at home watching reels

[Markoff]

there is hardly anything kids can do in China, one of the main reasons why I moved away after my kid was born (besides dangerous toxic food and air)

while here in Europe I have within 10 minutes walk like 3-5 playgrounds for kids to play, in China I would have 0 even if we walked for half an hour, there are literally no playgrounds for kids at all, you will find exercise equipment for adults/old people in parks, but NOTHING for children and then they are surprised why people don't have kids in China

the fun with kids in China is meant to go to mall, pay fee for some amusement park and let kids play there, same with any other kid oriented facility, come, pay ticket so kid can play, but no public playgrounds, heck it's even difficult to find public football/basketball playgrounds, again in Europe I have at least 2-3 basketball courts around 10 minutes walk from home, in China impossible

been there last summer already with bigger kids and they had literally nothing to do when visiting in-laws in their miniscule 600-900K town (Beijing suburbs), we found some kids amusement park in walking distance at the end of trip, but nothing to do anywhere, they could walk to park where there was nothing to do for kids, so only time they could do something interesting was walking around Beijing, checking sights, maybe playing pingpong

[seanmcdirmid]

Same, although we left before our kid was born due to Beijing's pollution level at the time (it is better now, but still bad).

We found stuff to do last year when we visited Beijing, but we were closer to center city and ya, no playgrounds outside of a few higher end apartment communities. We have a trip planned this summer but the kid is spending 2 weeks in a Chengdu summer camp that is pretty activity loaded.

[brightball]

I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.

It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.

[zabzonk]

Far better to be out on your bike, exploring a wood, climbing trees, and possibly disturbing a very grumpy badger.

The mall - breathing plastic fumes, looking at overpriced plastic toys, summoning your parents for your every whim.

I know which I'd want for my kids, should I have any (too old & ill now).

[mapt]

It's not a choice between A and B. Right now we're predominantly going with C - you have little direct contact with friends, you have no mall, you exist primarily on social media developing mental illness through all the algorithmic maladies and the ones associated with constant social performance. Or D - isolated entirely from anyone but parents, socialized secondhand through media/games.

[brightball]

We did that too, but the mall was also a good time.

Since we couldn't drive, parents had to drop us off and then eventually come pick us up again.

[goosejuice]

> able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous.

A lot of small towns, even in the US, offer such things. Towns far from being a city. It should be more common though.

[antiframe]

Yes, and by "city" I mean a walk able streetcar neighborhood. The parents can commute by foot/bike/bus, the kids can get around by foot/bike/bus. Lots of town are also structured like that, but they're not close enough for enough employment for the parents. You can have both: a small neighborhood feel with enough density for a quality car-free living and access to many employers in "cities".

[goosejuice]

Yeah walking to work would be pretty uncommon, though you can commute into the city. My comment was mostly about kids walking to school / into town and low crime. I don't think that's too uncommon for suburbs served by train in the US. College towns are pretty good for this as well. They can be costly for houses though.

[AnthonyMouse]

> But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.

It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning. It's not that there is nowhere for you to exist without a car, it's that there is nowhere for you to exist there at all, and you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.

If you want to build a cafe or an arcade or a hackerspace out in suburbia, can you? That's not even about density. If you could put those things there then people would and there would be something kids could walk to. But everything other than residences is banned, so of course there is nothing else there.

[oersted]

As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better.

Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space.

Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention the savings on your energy bill.

I want my streets to feel alive!

[macNchz]

In most of the US, only single family detached houses are built (by law), which makes things spread out enough that people will want to drive. To address that, businesses are required to have a bunch of parking space. The end result of that is that, outside of a few places built before these rules took hold, living near amenities means living by parking lots and car traffic. The kind of street that "feels alive" is basically just precluded by rules that facilitate a car-first way of getting around.

[oersted]

Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space.

I get that it is low density, but not that low, and there is some money to spend in such areas. They would do good business.

[steveklabnik]

> Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space.

I know it sounds insane, but no, in many places, this is not possible.

My city, Austin, eliminated mandatory minimum parking in 2023, and was at the time the largest US city to do so https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/austin-minimum-parki...

I know of at least one business in my neighborhood that died due to these rules. They needed to expand to make the business work, but doing so would require that they buy even more land, in a fairly dense neighborhood, and turn it into parking.

[oersted]

Oh I understand that it is a regulatory constraint. What I don’t understand is why the regulations aren’t changed. Who is benefiting?

I don’t see why it wouldn’t be better for everyone, both in terms of business and living standards.

[macNchz]

There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission.

In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).

[bombcar]

Even where it's allowed (which is more places than you think, look at zoning maps) and some places where it's not (variations exist) the places that do pop up usually die.

It takes serious dedication and time to turn a culture around, throwing in a few "desired third places" isn't going to cut it - at least not before the rents become too much to bear.

[amanaplanacanal]

The whole parking thing is just so weird. Looking around my neighborhood, every house has a two car garage and enough room in the driveway to park either 2 or 4 more cars. But somehow street parking is at a premium.

[carlosjobim]

Suburbia = New developments, not inherited through generations of family

New developments = You buy your land plot, you don't inherit it

Restaurant or small shop = Very small profits

Restaurant or small shop outside city centre = Even smaller profits

Very small profits = Not a good investment of time or money to build restaurant or small shop in suburbia

Compared to:

Inherit restaurant in European town = No rent or interest to pay

Inherit restaurant in European town = No cost to build restaurant

Inherit restaurant in European town = Mortgage the building to borrow money for reforms and investments.

> They would do good business.

Then why aren't you opening restaurants and small shops?

[AnthonyMouse]

It's some kind of perverse regulatory capture by landlords with the self-destructive assistance of homeowners. Actual urban real estate is preposterously expensive, but the only reason it stays that way is that you can't create more of it, i.e. put urban developments in high demand areas that are currently suburbs.

The landlords who own the urban real estate correctly deduce that allowing more to be built would lower rents. They then convince suburban homeowners to go in with them on preventing that from happening, even though it's not really in the homeowners' interest, because rezoning would reduce the value of housing (i.e. price per square foot) but increase the value of land because you could build more housing on it. The urban landlords are the only losers there, because they have a high ratio of housing to land, so they want the housing to be expensive rather than the land. The ordinary suburban homeowners, by contrast, have a high ratio of land to housing, so they benefit from making the land worth more, i.e. allowing more to be built on it, but are bamboozled into wanting the price of housing to be high and therefore oppose urbanization.

You also get a lot of rubbish arguments about "induced demand" which try to imply that building housing would raise prices, when what it actually does is raise prices in the area immediately surrounding the new development (because people like new developments) while making it more affordable in all of the places they're moving from. Which is then used as an excuse not to do it, even though it improves affordability on net while creating more of the areas people actually want.

Something similar happens with commercial space. The landlords want it to be scarce. The argument used in that case will be something like "businesses will buy up houses to build Starbucks" or "it will make traffic worse" as if they wouldn't happily give you a Starbucks and a dozen new housing units on that piece of land if you'd let them, and as if traffic gets worse instead of better when people are closer to things and therefore drive fewer miles. But again it's really the landlords with the limited land that is zoned for those things trying to keep anyone else from getting any, and the other arguments are just the kayfabe because "we want rents to be high" is unsympathetic.

[oersted]

I do understand why it is kept as low-density, that makes sense. But why not allow intermingled small shops, family-friendly restaurant/bars, schools, sport facilities… Surely they would make the area more desirable?

[galangalalgol]

I read that the banks often set minimum rents on the commercial real estate built or renovated with their loans. The minimum is too high for most any business to be profitable, so you see a series of failed attempts until a big chain like 711 or Starbucks rents it. They still don't profit and just close the store but keep the rental because longer terms usually. Not sure why the banks have this incentive.

[MSFT_Edging]

A pet shop in a strip mall closed a few years ago due to a rent increase. The spot has been empty since. I really think there needs to be some reverse market incentives. No tax breaks on empty space if you can't show you're making honest effort to rent it out, and progressively lowering the cost of rent to reflect the lower property value.

If it's actually a market, it should go up AND down. Otherwise it's just a scam.

[steveklabnik]

A lot of this boils down to decades of compounding preferences. Americans were taught that their birthright is to live in detached homes in low-density areas. The density is seen as a negative, yes.

I don't get it either.

[smallerfish]

There isn't resistance. It comes from development patterns.

A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.

[oersted]

I am sure that they could better maximize their returns by making room for local businesses and increasing the appeal of the area. And who says that a house will be worth more than a shop?

It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.

[bluGill]

You need about 10 houses per shop (anyone with better numbers? this works for discussion but it is likely wrong). However everybody needs many different shops and so it isn't a case of 10 houses 1 shop - since you always need to go elsewhere anyway wouldn't even think of the local shop when it would do and so they fail. Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.

Shops do better when clustered together. People combine trips and so if they need to go one place for any reason that will often enough "drop in" to a different one.

All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!

[AnthonyMouse]

> However everybody needs many different shops

That doesn't matter to any given one because they rarely need multiple types at the same time, so they just go to the nearest one of whatever they currently need. If you could build them in the suburbs then for many people in the suburbs, that would be the nearest one and it would get enough business to be sustainable. While reducing traffic because now some subset of the customers can walk to it instead of 100% of them needing to drive.

> Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.

Isn't that mainly because of zoning? The area with all the shops is the area where shops are allowed, or the area where something that pays higher prices for space than shops isn't.

> All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!

You should be able to have the shop and a housing unit or three on the same piece of land, which not only allows you to make more valuable use of the land, it also puts more people (i.e. customers) near the shop.

[hansvm]

> 10 houses per shop

Broadly speaking, that sounds super low, and it also doesn't echo the business density I typically observe. I think even for lifestyle businesses you need hundreds of homes actively using your services, maybe thousands total. Suppose you really could live off just 10 houses; you'd need something like $2400/yr/person in revenue at 100% cash operating margins to turn it into a reasonable income (which, given your risk exposure via rent, capital, etc, I don't think most people would start a business with the intent of the owner making less than $60k/yr in income, perhaps scaled down in much smaller, cheaper towns). There aren't many kinds of businesses where I spend that much money, and those definitely don't have anywhere near 100% margins. Just right off the bat, 100 or 1000 feels closer to correct than 10.

Most small businesses have fairly low margins. Even when you factor the cost of owner labor at zero (common for "lifestyle" businesses -- splitting it out this way so that we can look at COGS and then compare to a single family's income), you might see 10-20% cash operating margins for various shops, cafes, restaurants, 5-10% at groceries and pharmacies, 20-40% at bike shops and gyms, and 50%+ at barbers (details, especially for higher-margin industries like barbershops, depend a lot on the exact terms of rent and local tax laws, but this is a halfway decent ballpark).

Let's run some numbers.

The average person waits 2 months between hair cuts. Let's assume a moderately expensive cut at $40. The owner keeps $120/yr/person, or $300/yr/house. In the sort of town likely to have $40 be a reasonable baseline haircut price, $60k/yr is probably the bare minimum you'd want the owner to make to call this endeavor successful, especially when you factor in the increased financial risk they're taking on, so you need 200 homes actively frequenting your establishment in particular.

The average grocery bill for a single person is $300/mo, or $750/mo per household, of which the grocery store owner keeps $37.50-$75/mo, or $450-$900/yr. You need 66-133 homes frequenting that establishment in particular to keep its lights on, but I'd argue $60k/yr, while low for a barber or hair salon, is extremely low for a capital-intensive business.

Suppose you have a local cafe or bakery you visit every weekday on the way to work, or maybe every weekend on your morning walks. You spend $10 on a couple nice croissants, a single stuffed croissant, or something to that effect -- averaging the two customer types together, you spend $5/day, $1825/yr, $4562.50/yr/house, and the bakery keeps $456.25-$912.5/yr/house. You need 65-132 homes actively supporting that business. If you have customers like me who basically only stop in to the bakery when extended family is in town (preferring to cook my own), I might slightly bolster the grocer's margins (not a ton if I'm just buying flour, yeast, butter, and salt), but you need 1249-2500 homes like mine to support the bakery.

Retail shops (bookstores, local artwork, etc) have a pretty dismal outlook too. Used books are dirt cheap, I don't read as much as I used to (picked up other hobbies like playing the piano), and I do a lot of my reading online nowadays anyway. I spend maybe $100-$200/yr on books. I think that's above average, though I don't really know. The bookstore owner keeps $10-$40/yr though after rent and other expenses and needs 600-2400 homes filled with people like me (and who also don't share their books) for its support structure.

Instead of looking at rough estimates based on profit margins and usage, you can look at towns you understand reasonably well. One county I know of, for example, which does all of its business in a single, central town, has around 15k people, or 6k households (or if we're just counting the town population itself for some reason, 1200 households, but I think that's a significant underestimate). It has two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two music stores (instruments, lessons, etc, and another store outside of town), 15 restaurants (and another 5-10 in the rest of the county), and three pharmacies. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, it takes 400-3000 households to support most of those businesses, and 48-400 to support various kinds of restaurants. When factoring in just the county population, it's 2000-3000 households for normal businesses and 240 for a restaurant.

[handle584]

Problem with insulation is that it kills off all sound, not only noise. For example people might actually enjoy the sound of wind blowing leaves, squirrels running around or an occasional car driving by. There are devices generating natural noise for Passivhaus because its insulation is so great that people starts to feel eerie.

[breezybottom]

That's easy to say if you'd never had to live in a slum, but constant noise actually has negative health effects.

[buellerbueller]

Apparently all cities now are slums?

[breezybottom]

Us plebians don't live in expensive NYC penthouses.

[buellerbueller]

All urban living situations that are not NYC penthouses are slums?

[stephen_g]

That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!

[HDThoreaun]

> I want my streets to feel alive!

Most american suburbanites completely disagree with this take. They want their street to be quite and devoid of people. I think this is largely because there is no recourse for anti social activity in the US. People who have spent a lot of time in cities start to notice that anti social activity doesnt really get stopped and many decide it would be better to just not be around outsiders who could annoy them so they enact exclusive zoning to minimize interaction with people they dont know.

[oersted]

I can see that. But this really sounds like an imagined picture of someone that has lived in suburbia their entire lives.

Even in low income areas, seeing actual antisocial behavior is very rare. People simply have better things to do than to be problematic, especially those struggling to make ends meet. And they are smart enough not to shit where they eat, and generally band together to prevent bad apples from getting out of hand. They have families too.

Fine yes there are areas actually infested with gangs, addicts and the homeless, who do not have better things to do and are anti-social. But those are rare in the grand scheme.

I have been in most of the so-called dodgy areas in the Bay Area and SF. I was quite confused, it was rather nice! Just lower-middle class.

A lot of it is built up in people’s heads, and reinforced by media.

[HDThoreaun]

Ive lived in Chicago my whole life. Anti social behavior is not common, but it's definitely not rare. On public transit it is pretty standard. I think the lack of enforcement is what really rubs people the wrong way though. Not like someone being loud in public or whatever is that big of a deal, but it can create a mentality that quickly turns into a low trust society. When people dont respect your wishes why should you respect theirs kind of thinking. Most of chicago is absolutely a low trust society. Everyone acknowledges that rules arent enforced and are therefore optional. Low trust society + optional rules is an environment that many do not enjoy. The exclusionary zoning is just a reaction to that. When these people think of streets that are "alive" they remember that time they almost stepped in human shit in the park and they feel helpless. That feeling of helplessness easily overwhelms all the great times they had. Maybe theyre wrong to feel that way, maybe not.

[tech_ken]

> It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning

> you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.

I hear your point but I think your causal model is misguided. It's two different things augmenting each other, not "one is a more primal cause than the other" (in my opinion, anyways). Like yes road diets in the suburbs won't 'solve' the problem by themselves, but the impact of the zoning changes you're pointing to may also have the impact of reducing car dependency in the area (although not guaranteed, I've seen USians drive even just half a mile). Cars collapse distance, and zoning policy eats up those gains greedily. SFH zoning spaces everything 10 miles apart, so all the residents buy cars because there's no alternatives. It's multiple threads reinforcing each other; I think if you dig into the ""trendy"" anti-car arguments you will find a lot of backing for mixed-used zoning policy as well because both types of changes are needed at once.

[grvdrm]

Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance"

Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?

I lived in Manhattan (NYC). Walked a mile at a time (or more) without thinking about it. To/from work, in cold, in rain, etc.

Now I'm in NYC 'burbs. The train is 1.1 miles from my house. I walk that distance on occasion but not often. My wife drives to/from train most days.

Town is also 1.1 miles from my house, near the train. My daughter is about to be 8. I'm not far off from letting her wander into town on her bike (or on foot), but it's anywhere from a 10/15-25 minute journey depending on how fast you walk/bike and how often you stop.

I also live in what feels like a dense suburb. Many houses close to each other. Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8

So, I think there's a difference between nothing to do and it's "close" - whatever that means to you, and there's nothing to do and it requires a 30 min car ride.

Those latter suburbs aren't far from me, and I grew up next to one good example of a suburb w/large houses and nothing much else (Dover, Massachusetts)

[throw0101c]

> Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance". Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?

It may partly be psychological: in 'the city' there is human activity and you do not feel isolated, and you feel part of societal activity.

> I also live in what feels like a dense suburb. Many houses close to each other. Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8

LOL: have you noticed the lack of sidewalks? Here are some examples of what is a "streetcar suburb", which was developed in the 1890s/1900s:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Toronto

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto

A good portion of these houses were built before the car was invented, and while many folks park on the street (you have to pay for a permit), there are also lanes and garages for many of them. A couple of schools with-in walking distance, banks, churches, library, shops, etc.

[grvdrm]

Sidewalks are missing there but there are plenty in town.

I used to live in two of the streetcar suburbs: Newton Ma, and Brookline Ma. They are indeed more urban than suburban in many spots, but again, proximity matters. Those places feel more urban when you live near the MBTA Green Line (the streetcar) - let's say within 10 min walk.

[csomar]

It’s more rewarding to walk 2-3km when there is a lot of things to see/do compared to walking 1km just to get to the station in a lonely walk. Just having/seeing people walk along/across you makes a world of difference.

[dividefuel]

I think walking VS driving is also about convenience.

In the example we're replying to, the shared suburban street has a marked median (implying medium traffic), minimal shoulder, and no sidewalk. While the houses and foliage are very nice, it feels a little unsafe to walk on. Presumably the train station has nice parking, so driving is quick and easy to do. Choosing to walk in this case is more for leisure or for exercise.

In the city though, driving is a whole other thing. Storing a car and finding parking just to go 1 mile is a huge pain: it's much simpler just to walk it. Walking in this case may be for leisure and exercise, but it's also for convenience.

[grvdrm]

Right.

That train distance is ~20-25 mins walk.

So, I save some time driving - and use that time elsewhere.

Also, putting aside dense cities like Boston, NY, Chicago - I think most folks wouldn't describe many others in the U.S. as walkable.

LA? Atlanta? There are pockets of course.

[grvdrm]

I think you're right about people in proximity along the walk. Always liked that about Manhattan.

But even in Manhattan, I didn't regularly stop to chat with strangers. Maybe I stopped to grab coffee along the way. To your point, plenty to see and do along the way but I was often moving from point A to B - just like the 'burbs.

When I walk to/from train or town now I usually listen to something on my AirPods. Happy to do it without them but not a terrible way to spend the 20-25 mins.

[amanaplanacanal]

How far people are willing to walk depends quite a bit on what they are walking past. Lots of people will walk through an area of shops, cafes, etc, fewer will walk through an area of house after house after house, almost nobody will walk through an area that is one long concrete wall.

[ghaff]

It depends on the infrastructure as well. I'm about a 7 minute drive from my local commuter rail but it's essentially unwalkable as that 7 minutes is basically along an interstate. I do take the commuter rail if I'm going into the city 9-5 on weekdays but that's very rare.

[grvdrm]

Right.

I find this whole topic reductive in general. Specifics matter quite a bit. I don't disagree with some of the article but it feels very gloomy compared to suburban life I see around me.

[ghaff]

Yeah, it depends on your definitions I guess. I'm certainly not in classic suburbia. I think ESRI says I'm in an exurb. In any case, I'm certainly not walking anyplace except down to the river or to a couple adjacent neighbors or conservation land within a 100+ acres total. Where I grew up was similar. This is considered urban by the US census by the way.

[grvdrm]

Sounds anything but urban to me!

[ghaff]

Yes, but that's how the US Census divides urban vs. rural. Of course, they could go by more granular ESRI divisions but they don't. But various people use them anyway by imagining you're in Manhattan or in the middle of nowhere.

[ACCount37]

"Nothing to do" is not how children think. They're new to the world. Just roaming around a neighborhood freely is a lot of "things to do" for them.

Having exciting destinations helps, but children are perfectly capable of making their own fun.

Whether that can compete with the modern day "pre-made" fun of YouTube, Roblox and the likes though? That's a different matter.

[doctoboggan]

> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be.

We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.

[contubernio]

There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.

[doctoboggan]

Yeah I get that, the point I trying to (snarkily) make was that we have control over where we live and raise our families. People often opine about the wonders of urbanism but then move to the suburbs!

But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).

[galangalalgol]

I live in what passes for a walkable residential area in the south us. A 15 min walk to a street with shops and restaurants. You meet people on the way. But the weather is definitely a factor. It bounces around freezing for a month or three and bounces around 100F for another five. That leaves the final ~5 which are torrential rains interspersed with lovely weather.

[treis]

It's not really true. Almost every neighborhood in Atlanta has a cluster of shops or food hall kind of thing to walk to.

It's true that it's a massive lifestyle leap to go to no car. But walk to the park. Walk to get ice cream. Ride bike to school are all easily doable in atlanta.

[contubernio]

It's certainly true in Atlanta. That "cluster of shops" can be a long way walking (10-15 minutes) from where one resides. It's small, incomplete, inadequate, etc.

I grew up in Atlanta proper, so know the city well, and later, by choice, lived there for a few years as an adult without a car and it was genuinely complicated. I chose a place to live near my place of work (near = it was 30 minutes solid walking). I had access to a supermarket (15 minutes walking), two (!) transit (MARTA) stations each at 15-20 minutes walking, and several bus lines (none with frequency greater than 30 minutes nor standard deviation less than 20), as well as the "cluster of shops" to which you refer. It had a bar, a few restaurants, a laundromat, and a drugstore. For real shopping other than food I took MARTA to a mall. My morning walk to work around 6 o 7 am required crossing a street used by prostitutes and drug dealers. They didn't bother me but the cops were suspicious of me for being there on foot and more than oncee I had to avoid cops with guns out chasing someone down.

People there generally considered me nuts for choosing to live this way.

I remember fondly that on my way to work there was a street full of pecan trees and at the right time of year I could get a handful from the sidewalk (there were sidewalks!).

When I was growing up (true, this was a while ago), again in the city proper, the nearest park was 3-4 km away. I went there by bike and played pickup basketball or went to the public pool, but it wasn't exactly nearby, and it wasn't walkable. Ice cream bars could be bought at a convenience store several km in a different direction. The bus stop was near the park and the bus came every 50 minutes, with considerable variance. On it it took something like 40 minutes to get to a MARTA station. A single to and back trip on public transport could easily take 3-4 hours in total so I didn't do this often. My school was around 12 hilly kilometeres away, a bit longer if one avoided the interstate. Biking there required riding on heavily congested roads with no shoulder and dealing with drivers completely incomprehending of cyclists and later crossing 8 lane roads and facing considerable danger the whole way. It could be done and I did it, but it was not particularly safe as there was no way to get there without dealing with rush hour traffic accessing the interstate.

I vaguely remember that there was a store within walking distance that sold automobile tires ...

[ghaff]

There are some places in the US--probably Manhattan most obviously--where there's a culture that doesn't have the expectation that you have a car. But, while people living in most other cities can basically do a post-university lifestyle without one even in cities with relatively good public transit, a lot of their friends probably live outside the city, a lot of activities depend on cars, etc.

I do know an adult couple in SF who gave up their cars but I'd observe that they rely on Ubers and various rentals a lot. I don't think I know anyone in the Boston/Cambridge area who doesn't have a car. Of course, they exist but I don't know one.

[treis]

That doesn't sound like very few stores in walking distance.

And yes things have drastically changed in the 10+ years or whenever growing up was.

[kjkjadksj]

Parts of Atlanta are certainly walkable today. Midtown or Buckhead would qualify.

[arjie]

Where is this? Our dream is to live in the city for independent access to amenities and frequently visit the woods. I have the economical means for this but the city is not the thing people say. As an example, Taipei had zero traffic deaths of children under 12 in the last 3 years. My San Francisco neighborhood alone has had 2 and Taipei has more kids.

Those were for accompanied children because San Franciscans adapt by helicoptering their kids to keep them from dying whereas I saw unaccompanied kids in Taipei everywhere and Taiwan is a basket case for fertility with a 0.7 TFR.

If we move out of SF it will be because the compensatory mechanisms required to keep my children alive here will overwhelm their freedom. But if there are cities of the Asian or European form here where children under 12 can independently move around then I’d love to know from someone who also has children in such environs. Often, online, people provide advice on this subject while being childless themselves and that’s not useful to me.

[folkrav]

I've been priced out of these areas. I'd gladly move back in town if I could afford anything closer, but I can't. I make quite higher income than the median, so I'd be extremely surprised if this was NOT the rationale for many others.

[pibaker]

There is a shortage of places for your kid to sleep at night though, as reflected in housing prices. It is especially bad for families because new apartments are often studios or one bedrooms.

[bluGill]

In most US cities the kid friendly places are the suburbs not the urban centers. Those suburbs require a car to do anything, but all the kids live there, and so all the things kids do are out there too.

[whoodle]

I’m sorry, but so few of these urban environments are affordable with good schools. I lived in Philadelphia and we chose to leave when our son was young because the schools generally aren’t good (most don’t even have libraries, but this is a whole different topic), the green space barely exists and isn’t maintained, and I’d never feel safe with my kid taking the transit.

NYC and Boston seem like the only east coast options and those are very expensive. What other options are there on the East Coast?

[matthewowen]

Philadelphia is absolutely an option, but it depends on the neighborhood. Eg if you live in the penn alexander, greenfield, or meredith catchments you have a great elementary/middle school and there are lot of kids of late elementary/early middle school age moving around the city independently.

I live in west philly and it is great: the park is excellent and lots of kids safely go there by themselves, the local school is very good. Transit (specifically the trolley) is good and safe.

[tintor]

Happier? In a city? Have you been to big US cities? Angry people, crime, homeless, mentally ill people, lack of police.

[rob74]

Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!

[Amezarak]

It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person. I think urban people are just so desensitized to it its hard to understand how big a deal it is to people who have never experienced that.

There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids or the general lack of unlocked freely available clean bathrooms in businesses.

[nostats]

It's also shocking to have someone roll coal or call you a gendered or racist or homophobic slur in the country because you look a little different.

Or seeing the expansive yards filled with decaying cars, appliances, and other metal scrap.

Both urban and rural life have people suffering from poverty, mental health issues, and drug addiction. It just looks different.

[embedding-shape]

> It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person

Is it? I never struggled with this, been yelled at countless of times by crazy people on the street, both growing up in a very rural area and now living most of my adult life in a metropolitan area. I don't think it's much of a shock to most, we know there are mentally unwell people out there already.

> There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids

What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.

[jhide]

> What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.

I think this was another comment about homelessness, not an implication about the law.

[doctoboggan]

>Have you been to big US cities?

Yes, I live in one, and it's a city that often gets used as the poster child for urban crime.

I don't feel in danger. What I am most worried about when walking with my kids outside is them getting hit by a car.

[datsci_est_2015]

This is funny, as it almost doesn’t pass Poe’s test.

I also find people are much angrier and misanthropic in the suburbs and exurbs as they spend their entire days in metal death cages that dehumanize everyone around them and turn every interaction into a confrontation.

Guess that misanthropy hypothesis gets another check in the anecdata column.

[watwut]

Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.

[virgildotcodes]

Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.

No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.

[carlosjobim]

Rural people have all been to the cities and seen what it's like with their own eyes. There's no mystery.

[nostats]

I've been in my city (Seattle) for 40 years. Homelessness has increased faster than population growth. Crime rates are way down. Like half what they used to be.

Mental health is down everywhere, nationwide, and we spend an absurd amount of money on our police.

I love it here, great city. It's not perfect, but I can't imagine living elsewhere.

[tshaddox]

No one wants to live in cities any more. They’re too crowded, housing is too expensive, and the traffic is too bad.

[TylerE]

If you actually look at US statistics, per capital crime rates are often higher in rural areas than urban one. Just, you know, more people in cities so bigger numbers.

[tshaddox]

It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>Happier? In a city?

Yes.

>Have you been to big US cities?

Whoever said anything about the US?

[porphyra]

Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.

[torben-friis]

Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children.

Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays.

But the children friendly aspect of society described above is 100% true. It hasn't degraded at all compared to when I was a kid.

[gligorot]

I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why.

I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept in the living room. Sure, it’s not perfect, but people did it. Same story happened in villages, and even it was the standard for some time.

So, whenever I see this argument I say we’re too posh in thinking it. There are different less comfortable ways to start a family and have kids, we just don’t want to do it.

For reference, now in my country everywhere new apartments are built (overbuilding the main city in the process, but different topic), yet prices are still soaring especially relative to the average salary. So same issue of high prices like everywhere.

Yet no one here thinks about the other option. The same argument from the linked article applies - too much comfort.

[torben-friis]

It's not just a matter of comfort. If you have no housing, you have a monthly recurrent payment to make, where failing once makes you homeless.

Will you be able to afford it next year? Next decade? After retirement?

Removing that permanent threat of ruin is then the priority. It has to be solved before children because once you have them, that's a an extra economic burden and you won't make it out with that extra weight.

[gligorot]

Yep my idea was that the grandparents have a house (paid off, no cost etc) and the others live there.

Regarding your other arguments, the Balkan cities are a bit unique in the sense that we have Roma people living in close proximity. And to see how they live without a single care is eye opening. To say favela is a compliment, they live in shacks, don’t have stable work, live day to day… yet have 3+ children each.

Not without issues of course, but it’s a stark reminder that while far from ideal, they still have kids. Their (and the kids’) quality of life is terrible, it’s not an issue to procreate.

Long topic for here, but if you’re interested check out a movie called “Gypsy Magic”, it shows their life and their daily trickery to survive (not a documentary).

[skandinaff]

The generation that lived through that, the next generation does not wish to live through it, as alternatives are "available" now (at least on paper). Those kids who grew up in 50m2 with no privacy, and at the same time absorbed western TV, where 300m2 detached house is a base in every show - formed their dreams towards that. This is why everyone is delaying family, because the image in their head is that to be truly happy, this is what you need. Very few people, living in those tight conditions grew up to be happy about their childhood.

[whimsicalism]

Your take is obviously correct, but you won't be very popular for stating it. The real drivers are media, birth control, and rising leisure opportunity costs.

[orphea]

Is it hard to imagine that younger generation wants to live better lives? They don't want to suffer like their parents did. They are already fed up with all the bullshit that the current generation of politicians leaves to them to figure out?

What is this argument, "too much comfort, too posh"?!

[gligorot]

What’s the alternative? I personally don’t want to not have kids, whatever the cost.

I understand the position of others and it’s logically valid, but for me it’s a line I’m not willing to cross - for beliefs, personal reasons etc.

[swiftcoder]

> Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront

Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".

[calgoo]

As someone living in the center of Barcelona, i might have to come over to Galicia in the future. Hows the public schools in general, similar to here in catalunya i assume. Buying anything around here feels like a half million investment and its not wort it.

[swiftcoder]

The kids get to take a couple of classes in Gallego instead of Catalan, but otherwise I don't see too many differences.

Fair warning, that if you want to live in a city, while Vigo and A Coruna are cheaper than Barcelona or Madrid, I don't think its that stark a contrast - my friend was buying in a rural village, an hour from Vigo.

[marcyb5st]

I think that most of western Europe is fucked in that sense. Previous generations piled up a ton of debt and so now there is no breathing room for subsidize affordable housing, parenting benefits, ... . Add to that that you need 2 salaries to live, that you must study until when you are 25+ to have a degree, that you don't want to have a baby just when you career is starting, that housing is extremely expensive, that you need to save for your pension because clearly the pension system will be drastically neutered in the future due to the above mentioned debt, ... . Basically, there are a bunch of factors that stop many many couples from having children.

I'm Italian so the situations is similar if not worse back at home.

[amanaplanacanal]

Sounds very similar to what is happening in the US.

[tshaddox]

While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.

[Poacher5]

But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.

[breezybottom]

You think malls didn't have security on the past?

[nostats]

I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)

[kjkjadksj]

Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.

[OkayPhysicist]

They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.

[prmoustache]

Also you'd take your bicycle and pretend it is a motorbike, hacking stuff likw mounting a playing card to the seatstay so it hits the spoke and make revving sound when you accelerated or looking for planks and construction material to build ramps

[ethagnawl]

> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.

This is an important point. In my hometown, I spent a lot of time playing in vacant/double/unused lots. Those lots are all gone and have been turned into parking lots or mini-McMansions. It breaks my heart every time I visit my parents' house and I see that our old soccer, football, wiffleball field and all of the trees we used to build forts have been replaced by cheap houses whose lawns are covered in a rotating cast of inflatables.

I can't fault the landowners for cashing in on their spare property but it would seem that the town could do with more localized parks. If anyone has been to Alphabet City in NYC, a lot of vacant lots were turned into community gardens and they're incredible little oases to stumble upon and relax in for a few minutes. I wish the town had had the foresight to do this with some of the aforementioned lots.

This is a major aside but another major change is that >50% of the trees which used to dot my hometown are gone. They either fell, died or got in the way of the power lines and were not replaced by the town or property owners. The streets all used to be covered in leafy canopies, everybody's houses were a few degrees cooler and all of that wood prevented a lot of the noise pollution from the Metro-North and I-95 from making its way through.

[simonebrunozzi]

You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.

[tweetle_beetle]

Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.

[simonebrunozzi]

The actual Venice in the lagoon is fine. Nothing like suburbia.

[hk1337]

We didn’t need things to do back then. We would usually find something like playing wall ball against someone’s house. What we need is kids who respect other people’s things, neighbors to not be crotchety, wide open spaces and trails would be nice.

[epolanski]

My family grew up in communist Poland. In the kind of neighborhood with those ugly grey buildings.

Well, say what you want, but the communists knew how to build neighborhoods.

Between all buildings there was always a 30-50+ meters green space with benches, places for kids to play, walkways, etc.

I remember in the early 90s how lively and safe it was. People spent a lot of time of the day outside. Grandmas had their benches, looked the kids, play, adults would gather and have a drink, etc.

Today? It has all been swallowed by cars. As progress and money came the entire neighborhood has been swallowed by cars. Kids are confined in a single area. You rarely see people outside. People sit at home.

For reference, this is my old neighborhood, albeit the street view is a decade+ old (half the areas are from 2013 because since then entrances to cars have been gated and are only for private cars), but if you stretch the imagination and try to put people around and benches and kids playing areas you can get the sense:

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81596...

[kjkjadksj]

Suburbs are fun as a kid if the parents are chill. Some of my best childhood memories have been roaming suburbia like a pack of dogs with no regard to anyones property lines. Places to sit? Kids don’t need that. We are content with some bushes by the drainage ditch with some standing water to throw rocks in. Yes, this happened in internet era too. If you had friends, those are way more fun than web surfing alone. We never even grew out of that stuff. Transitioned right out of games of tag in the woods right into smuggling beer into the woods.

[chrisan]

> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.

This is very bizarre to me. I never once thought about a chair as a child. _If_ you got tired you just took a seat anywhere or just laid down.

An empty lawn was the perfect place to play any number of things. Even better was when 2 empty backyard lawns connected and there wasn't much/any landscaping for some really big activities.

[waterTanuki]

Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.

Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.

[bluGill]

Suburbs are still like that. However each one is different. The block bbq always only happened because someone living there arranged it. Not every suburb had that person and so not every one had a block bbq. Likewise, kids play together when they are of close enough age. My daughter has lots of kids to play with, but my son just a few years older is frustrated because there is nobody to play with - it is completely chance that a bunch of 9-11 year old girls live in my area and few boys.

[dnnddidiej]

Surburbia gets a bad rap but you can have your burbs and something for kids to do. You need regular buses or trains, footpaths and parks with skateparks etc. My preteen kids get a bus up to (checks map...) 20km away.

It would be cool to live in a very dense Tokyo kind of place though. Tokyo is like a playground it is awesome!

[expedition32]

Americans used to drop off their kids at the mall but apparently even that's gone?

[dividefuel]

I know the discussion of urbanism vs suburbanism is a common topic on HN, but I don't think suburbs themselves are the root issue here.

When I was growing up in the suburb, there were kids outside all the time. Yes, some friends lived across town in another suburb, but we just biked there instead of walking.

Now when I visit that same suburb, there are no kids in sight. I still see adults of parenting age, so I assume there are still children in the neighborhood, but they're just indoors. The density of the town didn't change, but rather people's attitudes towards where kids can and can't be seem to be what changed. I also suspect the declining birthrate and having fewer kids is contributing to the problem too.

[whimsicalism]

yep, zoning and the gerontocracy. we should reweight votes based on age

[RHSman2]

Suburbia is the creepiest thing known to man.

[breezybottom]

This is something that could only be said by a sheltered suburban kid