Is this true? I work in a suburbanish portion of the bay area, and 90% of my coworkers commute in from San Francisco and Western Oakland. San Francisco is more expensive and is further away, but the advantages of urban living are multi-fold. Walkable neighborhoods, access to more restaurants, bars, and nightlife, access to more culture (museums, openings, concerts, etc), more people to meet and talk to, etc. Given the choice I would almost certainly choose to live in a city vs. a suburb or rural area.
A big part of that is probably that I wasn't raised in a city, so my contact with them has been while on vacation. Living somewhere and vacationing somewhere are certainly very different experiences.
I live within walking distance of about a dozen restaurants and a bar. I've never been a nightlife guy. There are museums and concert halls 30-60 minutes from here. My home is fairly cheap for the area, and I live under 15 minutes away from work. I don't feel like I'm missing out.
So while I understand that a lot of people would like to live in a city, I don't see the attraction. I feel like the downsides outweigh the benefits.
You're not in the suburbs. At least not the kind that cityfolk say are soulless wastes. It sounds like you live in the downtown of a village or town.
When I think of the 'burbs, I think of vast expanses of asphalt where only the poorest would consider walking and labyrinth enclaves of cul-de-sacs where taking the kid to play with a neighbor requires a half-mile drive to go 500 feet as the crow flies.
Modern design (and redesign, though that has less freedom) of low-density suburbs, while still avoiding street grids to limit residential traffic speeds, often embraces walking and bike paths that are more direct than roadways, and designs that improve transit serviceability, instead of using the branching, cul-de-sac dominated structure of, say, 1960s suburbs.
Further, I want that walk to be reasonably populated all day and into the night, so I feel safe.
Under half an hour away from work (by whatever means), somewhere I can afford to buy, quiet neighborhood, nice view, trees around, good schools, not too tightly packed, with a reputation of being safe enough that I don't have to worry if no one else is around.
Walkability is a plus, but not at the cost of other goals. If I ever want to see family or friends, a car is a given. Survival doesn't strictly require one, but it would complicate a number of things.
When you've got kids, things like bars and restaurants take a back seat to good schools and family-friendly neighborhoods.
Of all my coworkers with children, maybe 10% chose to stick it out in SF and they seem to bitch non-stop about the schools.
If a family with two adults and three children wants a 3-bedroom property, their budget depends on two adults' salaries minus the costs of three children.
On the other hand, if it's house-shared by four childless adults in their mid 20s, their budget is four adults' salaries, with none of the costs of children.
The problem is that with the rise of housing as an investment vehicle, cities have rapidly increased in price. In most countries housing is not a high-yield investment like stocks, it's a safer, low-yield investment like bonds. REITs have managed to destroy the goal of affordable housing for most people.
20s through 50s.
> London is now building so-called “co-housing” which sounds like it should be for retirees but is for the working young who have been priced out of even renting (let alone purchase) but IMO that is a shocking non-solution. It is forced barracks living–for people in their 20s and 30s (soon … 40s & 50s)–and seems very redolent of USSR communal apartments with shared kitchens etc. The common thing within the Anglosphere (and places that mimick it, like HK) is the abandonment of public housing for at least the last 35 years (since 1997 for HK), along with tax policies that promote unproductive property speculation.
I live in a former communist country, and as an urbanism-buff one of the projects I was thinking about in my head was to hunt down the remaining barrack-like buildings that are still extant (most of them have been built in the 1950s and the early 1960s as a temporary solution for a fast-growing urban population, very few actually still exist). Interesting to see that the "West" is resorting to the same ideas 50-60 years after we did.
You're absolutely right! There's a lot that can be done, and it can be done by the big tech companies. However, I'm told it is possible that there might actually be some advantages to sharing a physical location that are not readily replicated remotely. Maybe those people are wrong and I'm horribly misinformed, but what I've read does suggest that the costs are worth it.
Maybe you have better ideas? I hope so! Please, help me understand better!
I share your hope for the possibilities offered by VR, but I'm hesitant to shape urban planning policy for decades around it.
Parts of New York City are incredibly child friendly. Park Slope, and huge swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, are chock full of families.
This idea destroys what any normal people think of as actual rural or country life. Densely clustered homes and buildings (like this: http://www.citymetric.com/sites/default/files/styles/nodeima... or like this: http://tomsavagebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Swiss-t...) do a much better job of preserving the landscape and the ecology than sprawling out (like this: http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/d46e2d569d6948eea499aa20f2d1709c/n...) does.
Also, the appeal of living in the country isn't privately owned "wide open spaces" it's that cozy small town vibe where everyone knows each other and is in each others' business all the time (for better or worse). If all you want to have a ton of space for yourself it's actually fairly easy to do that, it's just hard to expect society to subsidize the infrastructure that makes it convenient and easy to have your social and commercial needs met at the same time.
>If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.
Cities have what are called agglomeration effects. Work isn't just punching a clock for a wage, especially not knowledge work. It takes creativity and collaboration to get good results and not being able to do that in real way with your colleagues just doesn't work.
Also, most people in nice cities actually rather enjoy it once you take noise and cost of living issues out of the equation. The former is just a problem of not investing enough in noise abatement and the latter is just an issue of not having enough mixed-use urban land available for the number of people who want that lifestyle.
>more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley
Or you could spread a culture of urbanism so places like Cincinnati or Minneapolis can build themselves the same kinds of civic amenities that draw people to New York and Silicon Valley and fostered the kinds of entrepreneurship that made those cities into what they are today.
The wealth in NYC and SF aren't properties of the soil. Those places are rich because the people there built businesses that made them rich. Sure, having major ports helped but that hasn't been a significant enough factor to bring cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, or St. Louis to prominence in the modern economy.
Based on what I know, people are flocking to cities because they want to be there, and companies are locating there in order to be attractive to employees. Cities have very high levels of services (due to economy of scale and density), restaurants, the arts, sports, walkability, bikeability, energy, community ... sustainability ...
San Francisco has all that in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Many people prefer that.
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/19/17029308/trash-needles-feces...
I am not sure I want my children dealing with human feces (and the risk of diseases such as hepatitis A) and used needles as part of their childhood experience.
Although I don't see why "just get a vaccine" is a sufficient response to "I don't want my children around feces and needles".
Density still matters though. You can go your whole life in the middle of nowhere without seeing someone take a dump in a public place or see a car that's been broken into.
The problem in cities is usually that some people aren't allowed to use any of the many toilets that exist, which is a much easier problem to fix.
> Something drilled home to me at my Cornell planning program was the American idea of rural as utopia, urban as dystopia. As my professor would put it, our culture strives for a return to the Garden of Eden – it’s seen in our art, our land-use patterns (pre- and post-independence), our mythology, and our politics. Even Philadelphia was laid out with that idea in mind.
I think that is one of the core issues. The idea of having your own home on your own plot of land is something that is deep in the American psyche.
And it is something that can be accomplished. Why is there not more remote work even at the big tech companies? If everybody was not forced to crowd into Silicon Valley in order to work for the large tech companies, Silicon Valley and San Francisco home prices would get much better quickly.
Many times, people feel like they are forced to live in cities, not because they want to, but because they have to for their job. If we promoted a culture of remote work, then people could live where they wanted, more wealth would get spread out through the country rather than being concentrated in NYC and Silicon Valley, and the affordability of living in cities would rise.