Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes. Once that happens the market (and politics probably) are going to do some really freaky things.
I see this often. Very few people want large homes when they are either single or don't have kids.
As soon as you do have kids and they start to grow to an age where they want to play outside, having space to run, play sports, be away from traffic, have their own room, etc gets a lot higher on your priority list.
You can also get a suburban home without it being "large" and still get a lot of space to go with it. People used to get "starter homes" and then periodically trade up if/when their incomes increased or they had some equity in the home.
It seems like the biggest barrier to this today is that people want to go straight to the HGTV home. I can't tell you how many people I've known who, straight out of school, overextend to the most expensive house they can afford.
If you want more house, for your money...that usually means buying farther away from density.
It is totally possible to live in a walkable area with urban amenities without being inside a dense mega-city. These used to be called "street-car" suburbs-- urban nucleations that exist just outside of the central business districts of medium-to-large cities. They're sort of like cities unto themselves. They're sometimes referred to as "main-street" communities.
Lots of people live in such places and don't realize it or they've managed to give too much away for automobile infrastructure to notice that, YES, it is possible to live such that not every trip necessarily begins and ends with an automobile in a parking space. This can be done in many places _without_ moving to NYC/SF/Chicago.
How much house one needs (if any) is a lifestyle decision that can fluctuate over time. People can adapt. It starts with demanding things like "complete streets" (https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/national-complete-str...), walkability as a target in new developments and intelligent requirements for parking so that we don't end up with "ocean-of-asphalt" parking lots.
In Europe the children can go to a shared park or a playground. Strolling along a street is also safe and quite pleasant when there is little traffic. There is more space and things to do than you can have in your backyard. And more importantly, they get to play with other children.
This sounds exactly like the US suburbs I've been in!
I have a lot of friends, with kids, who have had to look farther out into the suburbs because of home prices and inventory. And nothing in this price range is HGTV material, believe me.
Your argument basically presupposes that there’s something desirable about suburban homes, and that people not buying them is abnormal. I find this both unconvincing and historically incoherent.
https://www.businessinsider.com/do-it-for-denmark-ad-campaig...
It's not shaming to point out a thing is happening or that it a thing is biologically necessary to further the human race. You're welcome to call it anything you want, but there's a lot of "shaming" that's gone in the other direction as well. I've watched it my entire life.
Desired home locations are just a side effect.
That is after all, how humanity worked for a few Millenia.
You're arguing for the Amish.
Even today, with a global fertility rate of 2.5 children per woman and a population of over 7 billion people I don't think there's any need to worry about biological mandates. On the contrary, I think that in developed countries where each human being consumes much more (and consequently generates more waste) than other countries the birth rate should be heavily lowered. Of course, our economy/society may not be engineered for that but better start doing it sooner than later.
On the other hand, getting eaten by a tiger, living with ringworms, having your teeth fall out before middle age, or having 50/50 odds of dying by the age of 4 is perfectly natural, does not go against biology.
I don't think biology is a great litmus test for how we want to structure society.
Which is a natural expectation of the species...
No, because they don't believe they're financially stable enough to support children[1]. Millennials have dealt with stagnant wages and rising housing costs.
(While some of the responses to that story ([1]) do indicate a desire to do things other than raise children, many of the responses indicate a desire, but a lack of ability. Additionally, leveling off the population growth of humanity would likely have benefits for the environment, though certainly some current government schemes assume infinite growth, and those will have a bad time.)
I'm personally in the "can't" not "won't" bucket. Real-estate in SV is nuts, and I will have to (as James Mickens calls it) complete the "sisyphean task" of escaping SV and its housing crisis.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...
I happily bought my suburban home instead of living close to others in a condo or a townhouse.
It doesn't make you a bad person to be taking advantage of bad policies. But cities do need to incentivize sustainable living over unsustainable suburban sprawl.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/5/but-rich-people...
Sprawl is not unsustainable if you internalize the external costs, and I'll argue it'll get cheaper as mobility moves to electric vehicles and trucks, new infrastructure (with higher longevity) is built in new subdivisions instead of trying to replace 100+ year old gas, water, and sewer mains, etc.
@village-idiot: To your deleted comment, yes, my Teslas have a carbon impact during their manufacturing, but it is less than the SUV and pickup truck we used to own. It is very difficult to have no impact whatsoever on the Earth; optimize the best you can.
I also don't have any kids and won't be having them.
The suburbs also have less attraction for me as a parent. In the old days you could let your kids roam a suburb freely - now you can't. So why not live in a city? You have the same restrictions, but also a lot more distractions such as free museums.
Nothing structural has changed about letting kids roam, but the social side has.
There are plenty of foreigner investors who'd be happy to buy their property.
It’s just like the issues with rail — because you have so many landowners, the capital costs of transforming a single family block or subdivision to higher density is really expensive or requires eminent domain, which would be politically difficult.
You can have scenarios (especially now that it’s ok to walk away from mortgages) where prices drop. Single family isn’t going away.
Due to the economics of supply and demand, if the former clause is true then the latter clause cannot also be true.
Sure, you won't turn Tampa into Rotterdam overnight but those changes are important and they do add up. 50 years of these policies would give us much better, even if not perfect, cities.
If so, we may have vastly different ideas about the definition of a city.
Also, Seattle, Philly, Boston, Miami, and lots of other smaller cities are very much unlike living in the suburbs.
As far as I'm concerned, there's a ton more "city" in those neighborhoods than those high-rises. Density is only one variable in an incredibly large equasion. Seattle has a good deal of its own as well. Even in neighborhoods as nice as Queen Anne.
That said, I wish most other cities had it as good as Seattle. And I wish Seattle was far more diverse than it is.
I had the impression suburban homes tend not to be well-built. They may last a few decades, but that's about it.
Unfortunately, my bike commute only happens occasionally now that I work in the 'burbs - which, at least here, is where all of the new office complexes are moving.
Or I could just get in my car with a light jacket and blast the heat. Rain, shine, snow, blizzard, whatever. I'm good.
When the snow is cleared you are generally fine with normal tires on bikes btw, because you can just go a little slower.
Come to Copenhagen or Amsterdam. We bike in all kinds of weather, backed up by great public transport.
I've scrapers are not a burden to carry in a car, but they do cost money, and require physical effort to use.
You should visit Copenhagen in the winter, and enter a dimension of slush, the freezing/thawing cycles make it extremely unpredictable to ride or drive in. Actual steady freezing temperatures are so much easier to deal with.
Also distressing was the number of people convinced that all wheel drive made their car safer in the snow.
I'm not very experienced with this stuff, but one of the issues is having sufficient traction to make it up hills, and all-wheel drive is superior at that. If you have to roll back down a hill and try again with a running start, that may be doable, but that makes things more chaotic and unpredictable on the roads (compared to making it up the first time). In an ideal world, other drivers would be attentive enough to handle it, but in reality not so much.
Also, more generally, because static friction is greater than dynamic friction, any time your tires lose grip, you have less control over your car at that moment. All-wheel drive means tires are less likely to lose grip when accelerating / applying thrust.
The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most.
All cars brake with all four wheels, drive type has absolutely no effect at all. All modern cars have enough braking power to slide on clean concrete, let alone snow and ice. The only thing you can do to improve braking distance is to change your tires.
Steering is only affected by drive type when you’ve got the hammer down, as you may be asking the front tires to propel and steer the car at once (this is partly why FWD cars often understeer). But in a snowy situation you won’t be driving flat out, so which wheels are driving will have little effect on steering, and zero effect if you’re coasting or braking.
What AWD is great at is getting you off the line in low traction scenarios, which is convenient. It also means that you can get an AWD car up to speeds that are unwise in the present conditions (remember that steering is two wheeled in almost all cars).
The only real advantage that AWD has is that AWD cars are typically heavier than their two wheel drive cousins, and weight absolutely confers safety in snow.
> The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most.
Yep, I could notice that when I was leaving north of arctic circle. Each time my driving mates ended up in the ditch (failing to turn on a crossroad), it was with a 4WD. I tried to explain to them that 4WD does not help to brake and turn (especially when their 4WD land rover/cruiser is 50% to 100% heavier than their regular car), to no avail :-(
Luckily most of the landings happened in the snow banks and were relatively smooth, but the lesson was not learned :-( But hey! they finally get to use the 4WD to pull back out of the ditch :-)
That much insulation seems utterly counterproductive for hot-weather exertion, though it probably would at least protect from sunburn.
Also, my Asian nose doesn't hold glasses very well. Once while biking in the summer (with sweat dripping) they fell off in traffic. I was basically blind. It was terrifying.
Thus, contacts.
Don't waste your time. Pro-cyclists are the most biased and privileged people I've ever met. Just get on your bike, it's so easy! forgets that some people have bad knees. All you need is some goggles when it rains! forgets that people wear glasses. Just wait for the snow to be cleared! forgets that some cities don't clear snow. Just buy knobby tires! forgets that smaller people will struggle with the extra weight. Just wear a face mask! forgets that some cities ban face coverings and certain demographics get looked at strangely if they wear balaklavas
I just find your hatred for cyclists utterly bizarre. Did a cyclist murder a family member and you need revenge, or what?
What I disagree with is the idea that we can build a society around cycling. I was lucky to be able to live close enough to work and be abled enough to do the ride 5 days a week. And I was lucky that, on days with bad weather, I could work from home because of my job as a software developer.
As I started to look outside of my own life, I saw that not so many people were lucky. Actually, most people weren’t this lucky. How would I ride to work as a construction worker, with all my equipment and rotating job locations? How could I do this as a nurse, where I would be on my feet all day working odd hours? The more and more I considered all the ways people participate in society, the more I realized that the very narrow constraints of cycling just don’t work for most people.
So sure, build the cycling lanes and bike racks, I’m not asking you to rip those up. There are many people who can cycle and we should accommodate them. But that’s it - Just accommodate them. Don’t try to uproot the core structure of our way of life. You’ll want the roadways when you get old and injured can’t ride any more.
People use this same logic when others suggest eating healthy and exercising.
"And if someone works three jobs and has ten kids? Hmmmm? Then what?? Gotcha!"
Begins to reek of someone using the condition of others to rationalize why they themselves can't be bothered to do something. Not to mention the fact that you're more privileged in a car than on a bicycle.
Cycling really does attract the same nonsensical aggressive reactions as eating healthy and exercising.
As opposed to a bike: "This thing has a very constrained set of operating parameters, therefore I use it occasionally when the situation fits best"
There have been a bunch of studies trying to measure the relationship between commuting time and (subjective) quality of life. Most of them find exactly what you'd suspect: longer commutes reduce quality of life.
The weird thing is that they found a small uptick at the absolute extreme edges of commuting, like in the 5+ hour a day range. It's still shittier than a 30 minute commute, but it was better than a 4 hour commute. Nobody really seems to know why this is, but it's there.
Either way, I walk to work. There are few better ways to commute, IMHO.
The bicycle is one of those ways. It's faster and significantly more efficient.
Personally, my commute would be too short with a bike. I like a good 20-30 minutes between home and work to clear my head and get in/out of the zone. But that's just me.
Personal limits of multitasking, I guess :-)
Locating offices unnecessarily in the middle of high-density cities creates long commutes.
Because the traffic in the suburbs is usually nowhere near the level of traffic in the city. The commute time tends to be relative to the traffic density more than the distance.
I drive to the same location, 15 miles away every day. Depending on the time of day and the traffic, the drive will take 15 minutes or 45 minutes.
The commute problem is forcing all of those cars down those same roads at the same time. Locating offices outside of the middle of cities would largely correct the problem.
Another example with even worse traffic (but you can usually walk a little bit for lunch time) is Sandy Springs + Dunwoody.
FYI these two job centers are, easily, a 30 minutes drive from each other.
These are scattered all around the city so choosing to live in a suburbs really limits your working options if you need to get to an opposite-side suburb. (60 - 90 minutes one-way would be normal to get from Alpharetta to Marietta with any traffic)
Compare that to the offices in downtown Chicago for example, where a large percentage of the workers arrive at work via Metra (medium distance commuter trains) and el (inner city public transit).
Similarly, going crosstown in Atlanta without highways is also bad.
Why are people willing to spend out their butts for just the right housing, when all they really need is a half-decent car?*
*and perhaps a two-thirds-decent library of hair-raising music or enlightening podcasts
Switching jobs is much easier if you can essentially keep the same commute. Companies are more efficient if their employees can easily meet with clients, potential recruits, attend conferences or just have coffee with their peers. All the positive spillover effects would go away if each company had its office in some random suburb.
The problem with your top-down utopian "we shall raze and rebuild our cities" rhetoric is that it always crashes against the massive inertia of the existing built-up landscape. No to mention that people genuinely like their houses, but we don't even need to bring that up.
Hopefully people aren't literally thinking that, considering that cars are only one piece of the carbon problem. It's not even the biggest piece.
Just because something is old does not mean it is a bad idea. By the way, bicycles were first developed in the 19th century (not 18th) and have been continuously improved since then. And motor vehicles are not much newer, anyway. The Benz Patent Motor Car was sold in the 1880s. For comparison, the most popular type of bike sold today, the "safety bike" became popular in the late 1880s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle
I've explained cycling to high-tech types as taking advantage of the literal nanotechnology the human body uses. Bikes make use of the human body much more than cars in my view.
I never said bikes are better in every way, or even more efficient. Actually, I think a well designed motor vehicle could easily beat a bike in efficiency, particularly for common diets, but it would be smaller like a bike. E.g., a motorcycle could be better.
My argument was that old technologies aren't necessarily bad and that motor vehicles are nearly as old as bikes, so the age argument also applies to cars. I don't disagree that cars have benefits.
Newer is not inherently better.
Ideally I'd love to see more of these bicycle silos, both attached to transit hubs and in office environments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4YPRAqXnc
They help solve the safety issues with leaving your bicycle somewhere. More traditional parking is great where space and trust allows, too (say, in a private office or behind a monitored door).
I think there’s a quiet bike revolution going on right now, EV bikes went from exotic and home made to common practically overnight. I’m excited to see how this will change our society.
The biggest problem I have with electric cars is that they continue to encourage low density low efficiency suburbs with hours long commutes into the high density cities. This is economically unsustainable, roads are expensive, and will only get worse as EVs pay no gas tax and weigh more than their ICE cousins. Considering that America's road system is in bad need of repair and we don't have the will or funds to fix it, doubling down on them is not a wise call.
Also, it's not like producing an EV is a carbon neutral act.