Re:In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build
by cylinder on Saturday April 16, 2016 @06:06PM
(#11512481)
Nobody has left suburban living. Young people have just delayed marriage due to financial instability and career preferences, and thus delayed childbirth. Older folks have sensibly sought to downsize when empty nesting.
The hyper dense mega city model is a failure for quality of life. Instead, a dense CBD with trains distributing the population to the suburbs, with medium then low density, with shopping zones on walkable strips built around the train stations, is the way to go. Add in good planning, with buses and cycle infrastructure for last mile. And lots of parks.
Melbourne, where the modern concept of suburban living as we know it originated, executes well on this. Perfect, no. But a good framework.
Re:In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build
by greggman on Saturday April 16, 2016 @10:15PM
(#11513198)
Failure by who's definition? I live in Tokyo, the largest city on the planet. It's a "Hyper Dense Mega City" and it's an amazing fun city with a high quality of live AFAICT. There are certain things about Japanese work culture that suck for some but that has nothing to do with the city itself and everything to do with traditional culture.
Re:In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build
by geomark on Sunday April 17, 2016 @01:03AM
(#11513558)
After seeing how a number of Japanese acquaintances live, I've concluded the lack of personal space is a kind of paucity that makes them very poor. Barely room for a couple with one child to keep the tiniest amount of personal belongings. A pet, a small garden, bicycles for the family, any number of personal possessions I consider normal are out of the question. People living in other capital cities experience similar, although not as extreme, paucity of personal space. I don't understand how so many people feel this is a high quality of life.
Also, as you point out, living in urban areas is a luxury good; as wealth increases (for a large enough segment of the population, at least), they're choosing to use that wealth to live somewhere a bit more exciting than a field in Kansas. I agree they shouldn't complain that it costs more than a house in flyover country, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't complain about a city making it unnecessarily difficult to add housing stock. Those who already live there are, of course, more entitled than anyone to complain about their lack of options when they get kicked out of their rent-controlled unit.
Funny anecdote about "north coast of Alaska." My dad visited the oilfields up there a few times as part of his job. In the early 90s I got a phone call from him on a satellite phone as he watched a midnight pickup softball game after the summer solstice. The delay in the phone connection was really entertaining and fascinating for me as a young-ish kid. I shudder to think how expensive that call was at the time, per minute.
20 years later, I rode up there on my motorcycle. I unclipped my iPhone 3GS from my handlebars, had a 5 bar 3G signal, and called my dad, effectively for free. It wasn't even roaming, because I was in the US! I didn't have to know how it worked, and in fact I still don't. It certainly wasn't a laggy satellite connection. Amazing how times change.