[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.

[bombcar]

The corner grocery store (a regular one literally a block away) is fine for many things for me - 10-20% more is fine and saves a trip.

But too many things are literally twice as much and for those the value of a Walmart trip is obvious.

[petsfed]

My point is that American suburbs are so aggressively designed for cars that even considerable cost and inconvenience (driving 30-40 minutes) is acceptable in the face of much MUCH lower prices (even if the prices are so low because the quality is commensurately lower as in e.g. Levi jeans since they started selling in Walmart). If we hadn't let our communities be planned around driving to begin with, then building a big box would be less effective.

People are so habituated to driving, and the walking/biking experience outside of inner cities so unpleasant, that the corner stores simply cannot compete. Of course a big box store is going to have better prices, they win on economies of scale. But we've allowed our cities to be designed around the total separation of residence and commerce, so that you have to drive an interminable distance on unpleasant, congested roads just to get to an ersatz corner store. May as well drive to Walmart.

[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.

[ghaff]

Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.

[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.

[bombcar]

The key is always setbacks - if you have to have ten feet on each side of every building, you can only get "so dense" without going for apartments that consume an entire block.

The problem is introducing the zero-setback designs organically - as the people there likely receive little to no benefit, and the people who do receive the benefit aren't there now.

E.g., a house could easily be fit between mine and the neighbors, but we wouldn't really benefit from the density improvements, and the family that would move into the "missing middle" doesn't currently exist here.

I'd love if our lot was zero setback, as I'd build an addition right up to the property line instead of having to try to find another lot/house in the area we want.

[bsjaux628]

It needs to start somewhere though. Obviously you can't just drop a single building in the suburbs and call it a day, it should be many, with plans for public transport, axing the zoning code to allow for the ground floor of the building to be used for comercial purposes.

[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?

[api]

City land owners use their political power to block new construction to force real estate to appreciate in value.

This can be overridden but it's hard. Most cities with good economies have unaffordable real estate.

[amanaplanacanal]

It doesn't have to, but at least where I live, urban means apartments, and the great majority of apartments are rentals, not for sale.

[throw0101c]

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

?

[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.

[sarchertech]

If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect property crime like motor vehicle theft to follow a similar trend, but it does. A very large chunk of the crime is gang related, and there is no gang violence in the suburb I live in.

Bars are also disbursed all over not just in the city center. We have bars here, and they produce essentially zero crime.

But even if all of the crime was alcohol related, all of the crime isn’t occurring inside bars.

[buildsjets]

I don't think you have an accurate and full understanding of the issues plaguing some areas of American city centers. I can't even recall the last time I saw a person who was drunk in public causing a serious issue after leaving a downtown bar. It just doesn't happen. Besides, you don't need to go to the city center to get drunk, we sell full proof booze in the supermarkets here.

People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kensington+phil...

[mothballed]

I've seen hood rats specifically camp out near the bar to find marks to steal from, though. In that sense the bar can congregate crime.

[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.