You have a very narrow definition of the infrastructure required to raise kids. People have been raising families in cities long before suburbs were invented.

We used to do apartment living, it sucked, especially when the neighbours kids started learning instruments.

Walking or... driving?

A 20 min drive is assuming a bit of traffic. It's not a big deal though. We are avid surfers and the kids go to "nippers" (Australian national club that gets kids into life saving and understanding the ocean).

As the kids get older, they will either drive themselves or they will get the bus to the beach if they want to hang out with their mates. The driving age here is 17 (that's when you can drive yourself). It's a semi rural area so driving or buses (good quality buses) are the norm.

When we liveed in Sydney, we used to live right next to the beach but the droves of people that come to visit ruin it a little. Where we live now, we don't get too many people coming this way other than locals which is awesome.

I mean, isn't a play room and a computer game room and even a music room just overlapping ?

The second living room has darkened walls and tints on the windows. It has a project bolted to the ceiling and a screen that rolls down for movies, smash and mario kart (my kids are still young enough to think Nintendo are the only computer games :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up.

> free events for kids, concerts just for babies,

more details?

> parks

My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have enough free space to play those kind of sports. Not to mention the walking parks and playgrounds in the suburbs are usually way bigger and less crowded.

> swimming pools

Suburbs have these too and one of my friends growing up even had their own backyard pool where we would play sharks and minnows, use the pool basketball hoop to play 21, or use the diving board. Playing the former 2 are much harder in a packed city pool then a suburban pool due to crowds, let alone a private backyard one.

> little league, soccer league, skate parks,

Had all these in the suburbs when i grew up and again, those require a lot of space which is in short supply in the city so there's almost always more available options to do these in the suburbs.

This is your problem. In a city you don't need to put yourself and your family in a deadly metallic stress machine to get places. And as a result you will feel happier and more connected.

Even in a city I am sometimes very shocked at what we put ourselves through to use a car. People constantly honking and flicking each other off with various insults and me on the sidewalk wishing they'd all calm down. (And when I used to drive too much, I was angry like them, and weighed substantially more.)

It's difficult to go anywhere without putting yourself in a "deadly metallic stress machine", whether it be a car, plane, train, boat, etc. I suppose if you have that much fear of transportation, living somewhere with ample options within walking distance is best.

Stressfulness is much more subjective. To me, city train systems are higher stress for me than the majority of the driving I do. Granted, I rarely drive in heavy traffic, which is more stressful. Since I don't encounter that while driving, I find subways more stressful since 1) I have to plan around their schedule 2) their schedules are always subject to delays 3) I have to be around strangers in close quarters and 4) you expose yourself to a higher risk of being victim to a crime

However, I have no problems riding the NYC Subway, Chicago's L, etc. when I visiting there.

There are also other ways to avoid miles besides living in a city. For example, I have a remote job, so I don't have a daily commute.

Different people have different needs, enjoy different things, and enjoy living different ways.

A packed 4-5-6 line on a sweltering summer late afternoon can be a bit of a metallic stress machine. Not deadly, at least.

I don't want to use the word virtue signaling because it's become a politically loaded term and I don't want to use it that way but your comment is just virtue signaling to the anti-car crowd.

Do you have children? I ask, because the frequency of attending these and all the other public institutions skyrockets when you have kids.

Before I had kids, it had been literally decades since I stepped foot into a public library. After we had kids, we go all the time. Same with museums, parks, pools, everything.

I’d bet that most towns and suburbs with 10,000 inhabitants have 2-4 of those, or more :-)

Well, the vast majority of families could never afford to raise a child in NYC or any other 'dense urban' area, so the decision is mostly made automatically.

You're missing qualifiers like "in the United States in recent times."

Your preconceived notions of what suburban living is like are just as inaccurate as the perceptions of city life of the person you responded to.

There were "woods" between the endless maze of houses, but all of them were just parts of other people's property. And who was I going to play with in them, except for my one nearby friend?

I ended up just playing a lot of video games.

For all that urban centers are supposedly "hostile places" (according to the GP), I look at the adults and children I know in cities and I see mostly fit, healthy, active people with multiple hobbies and interests. I look at the adults and children I know in suburbs and I see overweight, sedentary people who spend so much of their life commuting between work, school, and home, that they barely have time for more than one day of a week of something fun like an organized sport. The rest is just spent at home watching TV or playing video games.

If I do decide have children, I definitely know what kind of place I want to do it in.

We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway.

We had similar woods. We went out there and built a fort. We camped. We misbehaved. We went to the railroad tracks and put coins on the rails. We hiked a mile to a lake, carrying an inflated raft and fishing or camping gear.

Don't blame the suburb if you chose to play video games. I hear that cities also have video games.

And I bet it was uphill! Both ways!

The "woods" I mentioned were small enough that there was no point away from easy eyesight from some neighbor's living room windows. Sure, we played in them. But there was no actual sense of isolation. There were no train tracks anywhere nearby. There were some tiny lakes, but they were clearly on other people's property.

It's great that you seemed to live in somewhere more rural than me and that was an area you were able to thrive in. Still, if you look at populations of people as a whole I suspect you'll find orders of magnitude more bored and unhealthy kids (who start getting into real trouble) in suburbs than you find in cities where there are actually plenty of opportunities and things to do.

I grew up in a city of 75,000, in a house currently worth about $150k (purchased new in 1976 by my parents for $38k and sold in 1993 for $120k), on 2.5 acres. It was about 30% lawn, gardens & sports area and 70% wooded (with a creek, even!). I only had 1-2 good neighborhood friends but I did have a younger brother & sister and we were constantly outside doing something.

I think you need to think about how you define "city" and "suburb" a little more.

There is an international airport. It has seasonal flights to Ottawa, Toronto–Billy Bishop, and Windsor. Those are in Canada.

There is a professional sports team, the USSSA Pride women′s professional fast-pitch softball team. Another is the Brevard County Cocoa Expos, a member of the Women's Premier Soccer League.

There are top-rate museums. One has a Saturn V, a Space Shuttle, a Saturn 1B, the Apollo 14 Command Module, space suits, moon rocks, and related stuff. Another has the Gemini 2 spacecraft and a bunch of missiles. Another has spacesuits and Sigma 7, the fifth manned Mercury spacecraft.

I get that everyone is living the best existence out there, but c’mon people, isn’t it clear that there is no objectively better place, only places with trade offs that appeal to different folks?

I hated that move to the burbs... Nothing to do except getting kicked out of the local mall or Borders. No libraries, no parks, no pools nearby... And no public transport.

When before in the city I could just take public transport and go downtown, meet my friends, go to the library, etc..

Now that I have kids, I live in a city. But it's a quiet neighborhood, and we have a yard -- that I did appreciate from the suburbs ;-)

We don't have any metro lines but have bus and train.

Prices are reasonable because we are on the north face of a large hill and get little sun in the winter, and are not close to the downtown area.

Currently raising two kids in an urban center, and I'm excited for them to have way more opportunities than I had.

There isn't that much within safe walking distance of a suburban home. Especially now that anchor tenants and the attached malls are starting to thin out. Anecdotally when I went to college, the kids from the suburbs definitely drank and did drugs much more heavily, and I suspect it was because that's all there's left to do if you get bored of video games and whatever little is actually at your fingertips.

Suburbs are boring. I grew up in them and much of my family still lives in them. I understand why people live in them — cost and space for raising kids, but they are definitely boring. And most of the people I know that live in them wouldn’t disagree, it’s a necessity driven by cost.

I think a lot of people here think suburbia is some vast wasteland of houses as far as the eye can see. Sure, that exists in some places, but a lot of us live in vary diverse suburbs with mixed residential, retail, commercial, etc.

I also have to say I have not met anyone who lives in my area because it's cheaper :). If anything I could save a few bucks by moving closer to the urban core. Again, I'm sure the cost thing is true somewhere but America is a pretty big place.

In ages past, this had more to do with shopping than entertainment. I suspect that it will become obvious that Amazon has negated this need, partially or wholly. The only they don't sell (mostly) is groceries, which for the large part were and are available locally.

I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while having walking distance to amazing swimming (at least in summer), great nature and mountains within quick drive distance for the weekends, or where traffic jams mean usually at most 1 bottleneck street getting slow a bit twice a day for an hour. Those places are rare but they do exist.

And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).

Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.

But then again, where I grew up is very different from NY. My parents are both from NYC, and my cousins are both raising kids in the NYC area (one in the city, one in the suburbs), but my parents moved to Dallas a few years before I was born, and I grew up in Dallas but still got to visit my family in NY. NYC's strength is also the most aggravating thing about it: everything is in the city. This means that the suburbs are just bedroom communities with nothing to do. Visiting my family in Westchester has always felt like spending time out in the country. Dallas, on the other hand, is distributed and spread out. Except for a teeny tiny urban core, we're all suburb. We have edge cities everywhere instead of concentrating everything on one place. The suburbs where I grew up are also much denser than the suburbs where my cousins grew up, which helps.

One interesting study though is with my cousins in NY. They have three kids each, and both are fairly wealthy (honestly, they make more in a year than I'll ever see in my life). One of them lives in a swanky apartment on the Upper West Side, in walking distance of both Central Park and Lincoln Center. The other lives in a large house in Westchester, not far from where she grew up. I can say that, for my cousin who lives in the city, her kids have access to everything you mentioned, and she and the kids are very happy with where they live. But she's also filthy rich and is able to afford a very large apartment in a prime location. Not many people in Manhattan have that kind of privilege. Before she moved to the suburbs, my other cousin used to live in a teeny tiny two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City. When she had twins, there was pretty much no space for anything, and as soon as she got pregnant with her third kid, she and her husband immediately began looking for a house in the suburbs, and they moved right after she gave birth. It's a giant house with six bedrooms, an expansive basement, and a backyard that won't quit. She told me that while she misses her short commute, it's all worth it to give the kids a perfect environment to grow up in. And the kids certainly have no lack of anything to do: when I visited last year, the kids were all involved in multiple sports leagues and other activities. Everyone is happy with where they live.

Kids used to be able to play in the street in the city.

You have to have all these things, because the children in a city can't just run off on their own and have to be marshalled and entertained at every step. Living in the suburbs I used to just go out every day and play in the woods and hills with my friends and we entertained themselves. Hardly boring!

Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, everyone driving cars, etc. They have taxis of course, and some cars (not a lot really, given the population), and work vehicles, but not the huge amount of vehicle traffic we have. And of course, there's tons of trains and buses, so it's really cheap and easy to get around by public transit. On top of that, there's bicycles: tons of people get around by bicycle, and the traffic level and speeds are low enough to make this very safe, plus there's no culture there of being aggressive towards cyclists or pedestrians the way America has.

It’s not a complete reversal, but the fact that Japan’s rising birth rate has defied regional and global trends and persists despite continued urbanization and secularization shows they might be on to something.

Culture matters, and quite frankly Japanese culture is different.

Public transit? Most everyone in cities that really depend on it like NYC.

Middle school kids taking public transit by themselves is pretty normal.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy

I feel like there's basically a two-generation swath where kids were treated like they'd break if you breathed on them, which coincides with the first generation that's never known real deprivation (Boomers) raising kids in an environment where their leaders are trying their hardest to create an environment of fear to maintain social control in the absence of war and real deprivation. It's slowly reversing itself as Millenials are themselves having kids and realizing all the ways that they were screwed over by not being forced to face risk & adversity in their formative years. (There's a big selection bias, too, in that Millenials who buy into the culture of fear are just not having kids because they think the world is hopeless, meaning everyone who has a next generation tends towards the un-anxious population.)

If you go back to the 1980s, what she did wouldn't have been that remarkable. In that time, kids like me were gone from home for hours, walking or riding bikes for miles away from home, and we didn't have cellphones for our parents to keep tabs on us. Statistics show that crime rates were much higher (they peaked in the mid-70s, and have been falling since); the difference is that Americans just weren't paranoid back then the way they are now.

(Also stranger danger is overstated, most victims know their assailant, etc. etc.)

There are various historical factors that have resulted in that abysmal situation in the US. Assigning it all to a four-word summary of Japanese culture is a bit reductive. The dangers in the city are different than they in the 80's, and they'll change again. The important part is to believe we can do better.

In major American cities, kids are taken on public transportation all the time. Often big groups of school kids are in transit for a museum field trip downtown.

Homogenity has little to do with it. Same paranoia is applied to playground structures, when the child can stay alone home for 1 hour, to everything.

America (just as most developed nations) only props up their birth rate though immigration.

Also your ideas of children are way off. We have a seven month old and we read to her, take her to the library, go to space talks, etc. Actually we do a lot more intellectual stuff now. My wife has taken some online courses ans weve started re learning french. Parents who put their kids in front of the TV are lazy.

Parks exist in most urban areas and are perfect for kids to play in.

All the other dangers you mentioned are way overstated

I do not understand this paranoia that has gripped the American public. The way people act would have you believe things are worse today than in the past when all actual data (anf observation) say the contrary

Maybe when your kid is a bit older you'll understand the appeal of turning on the TV just to have an hour to clean up, do a bit of laundry, and prepare dinner...

You might be surprised how interested they are in helping out.

Maybe there are some super-parents out there who can manage to always make that work, but in my experience trying to get my kids to help when they are hungry and tired after getting home from some activity on a hot summer day is just an exercise in frustration.

They come from raising a pair of kids, currently aged four and five. We actually have been living on a semi-rural island for the last five years, though.

Minus the used needles and other debris that litter many of them. It’s a sad state that that’s the best place people with drug problems can go, but it seems they don’t have anywhere else to go.

It’s just not where I want to bring my kid to hangout.

The vast majority of the parks I've been to in the US have been clean and well kept up, even ones in the higher-crime areas of town.

> Singapore's top diplomat in the UK, Michael Teo, defended Singapore's harsh drug laws by pointing to the country's lower rates for drug use.

"8.2% of the UK population are cannabis abusers; in Singapore, it is 0.005%. For ecstasy, the figures are 1.8% for the UK and 0.003% for Singapore; and for opiates—such as heroin, opium, and morphine - 0.9% for the UK and 0.005% for Singapore," claimed Teo. "We do not have traffickers pushing drugs openly in the streets, nor do we need to run needle exchange centers."

https://www.tripsavvy.com/drug-laws-in-singapore-1629780

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

Not exactly aligned with Western countries of human rights.

And wow are you really advocating execution of people with addiction and mental health issues that use drugs?

I wouldn’t execute drug addicts. But their pushers? Line-em right up!

Do you advocate the death sentence for drug company executives as well?

The Dr. and pharmacists who enabled the opioid crisis as well.

But sure, if you have an alcohol executive cutting their wine with methanol, pushing it to middle school kids and breaking interstate laws shipping laws to evade enforcement, like you did in prohibition... screw him.

Period.

Junkies would get little red sharps disposal containers, and bring it back those back in for the deposit refund. They'd stop doing it on the streets (for the most part), for the same reason you don't see raging alcoholics crowding the alleys drinking moonshine.

Drug criminalization/prohibition creates all of the problems that most people associate with drug use/addiction.

When a city is wealthy it gets like the top level comment described. I don't know what it is but it's related to money. You can see this by comparing the wealther boroughs of NYC to the poorer ones or comparing the wealthier suburbs of Boston to the poorer ones. The poorer ones are more "alive" for lack of a better term.

The car stuff really doesn't bother me. It's just a function of the dominant means of transit when that city was built out.

Actually, it sounds a whole lot like the Phoenix metro area. Atlanta, SLC, and most of LA probably qualify too.

>Because "car-centric and pedestrian hostile" sounds more like most suburbs than most urban areas.

Most American "cities" really are more like suburbs, when you compare to real cities in other countries. Especially the cities which grew up after cars became popular. These cities were never very pedestrian-friendly. Phoenix is probably the poster child for this. The amount of sprawl there is ridiculous, and there's really no place that's pedestrian-friendly, just because everything is so far apart that it would take forever to get to your destination on foot, even though sidewalks generally do exist.

With rural areas the isolation is even larger if your on a farm that is miles away from any other human beings. You have a nearby forest to explore, but that isn't exclusive to rural areas.

I think what your complaining about is culture, and you're conflating it with the form of housing. It's how you can't let kids go out and find other kids to play with in the local neighborhood like you could in the 70s or earlier because it's illegal and enforced quickly.

You can do that in a city (see berlin: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/travel/berlin-family-holi... ), suburbia or a village but it's all dependent on culture and law.

when they get older, they develop more specific personalities/interests and they are likely to go to a larger school and make friends that live further away. when I was a kid, I lived basically right on the border between the city and the suburbs. all my friends lived just a little too far away to walk/bike to their houses, and the streets were busy enough that I doubt my parents would have let me anyway. any plans I made had to be convenient for my parents, and they tended to be pretty busy.

this is just my opinion, but I think "real life" doesn't really begin until you can move around the world on your own. for me, this wasn't until I got my license near the end of high school (which represents its own danger; teenagers are terrible drivers). I suspect my friends who grew up in the city, taking public transit to hang out with each other, had much richer teenage years than I did, maybe even safer.

But I have noticed (and been criticized on HN for claiming) that the parenting cultural bubble in SF seems completely unknown to many other subcultures. It is indeed a very good community, though.

You're right that they're practically suburbs though. Somebody did a transit-scaled map of SF and it actually takes longer to get from the Outer Sunset to downtown than from Mountain View, 50 miles to the south. One of the biggest problems with SF is that the public transportation system sucks, since it's such a patchwork of independent agencies. (Residents of these areas might consider this a feature rather than a bug, though, because it keeps the homeless, poop, drugs, etc. out of their neighborhoods.)

That doesn't take very long on the N Judah.

When I was a kid I grew up in a rural area, an urban area, then a rural area, then an urban area. They were both super cool, but I had more friends I could hang out with in the latter and so my life was automatically better.

There is some interesting historical reading here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ef3/28b64fdb97357674725324...

The modern twist on the concept is to focus on preservation instead of total replacement, trying to enhance the environment that attracted people to the diverse urban area in the first place rather than outright replacing it with centrally-planned alternatives. There are also large efforts to redevelop totally unused land (with projects like the Docklands in London or Hudson Yards in NYC) - but rarely in isolation, the goal is usually to incorporate the space into the rest of the city's fabric.

I completely agree with your points about cars, though - most American cities devote far too much space to them, especially storage of empty ones. We'd do well to shift our streetscape priorities to people, especially in dense mixed-use areas, which I think would be a big step towards the communal spaces you envision.

Not where I grew up and at least there is space to play sports. My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk past never have any free space.

I stepped out of my door into a hallway of doors, greeted by the scent of several different ethnic foods being cooked, and usually the sound of one or more families.

I take an elevator down the stairs to the lobby, nod at the guy manning the desk who was interested in what I ordered yesterday (it was heavy - he thought car parts, was a rack-mount UPS).

I step out into a U shaped walkway, lined with bushes, with a cherry tree in the middle before merging onto the sidewalk.

Fifteen minutes away in one direction is a zoo that was free. Full of kids learning new things about amazing wildlife. Five minutes in the other direction is a hiking trail, onto another hiking trail.

I think the city and the country and everywhere in between can be a wonderful or terrible place, but I would hesitate to say that any one place is right or wrong for any one person.

Honestly, most of SF is rather friendly and nice. I like it. First moved here 6 years ago.

Parking spaces and road lanes.

You can choose to optimize for car throughput or not.

Or you can choose to make your spaces look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3082077,-71.3535296,3a,75y,2...

Your call.

Residential and commercial space are both required. Picturesque low-density residential zones kind of force the commercial areas to be like this; how else would people get to them?

[0] http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

You can get a surprising amount of density from low rise buildings, with narrow tree-lined streets and generous sidewalks.

My take on the bad thing about sprawl and suburbs is the amount of time and driving needed to get to not sprawl and suburbs. And when there was 'the city' and 'the suburb' living in 'the suburb' was 'nice'. Now that it's all suburbs and a city jammed with traffic from the suburbs, nothing is that nice.

What you've described would be the experience of living inside the Loop in Chicago, amidst class A high-rise office space. People do this! But they actively select themselves into it; by far, most people in Chicago live in residential neighborhoods that read as such, are close to the heart of the city, and don't respond at all to your description.

You will never know I guess.

Now I can get to all of the aforementioned places via car in under 5 minutes. There's Uber and Lyft for when I want to go to a bar. DoorDash serves more than 50 local restaurants. Traffic adds at most 5 minutes to any drive, and only during a small window around 5pm.

The city offers convenience in theory, but from my admittedly anecdotal experience it doesn't hold up in practice. And I'm not sure that matters. At the end of the day, it's just a preference.

I... sorry, I don't believe that. I've never seen a suburb anywhere with ALL that stuff within the 1.5 mile radius you postulate. Sure, you get some of it locally. We have restaurants within 5 minutes, but the place we want to go tonight is 11 minutes away. There's a park next to the local school, sure, but the kids want to go swimming at the place with the good slide and it's 22 minutes away.

And FWIW: I literally grew up in urban Boston, and live in west coast suburbs now.

I have that too, and I didn't even try for it. I'm in unincorporated land just north of Indialantic, FL.

I had to check for pubs, because I don't use them. There are some within 5 minutes. In that distance I also get a beach on the Atlantic and a fishing dock on the brackish intercoastal waterway. It's 8 minutes to Walmart and 11 to a commercial airport. My workplace is only 3 minutes away.

Near me, 3-bedroom homes of about 1200 to 2000 square feet on 0.25 acre lots are going for $120,000 to $240,000. For 4-bedroom homes of about 3000 to 4000 square feet on 0.35 to 0.65 acre lots I think you'd pay $350,000 to $650,000. To get up over a million you'd need to be on the beach (sand and waves in your yard) or on the intercoastal waterway (with a dock for your yacht).

It can't be helped if you insist on going to the far-away restaurant and the far-away park. There is always something better, so you'll end up traveling the farthest that you tolerate.

I agree with almost everything you say but this. Why low rise? With high rises, we can use less space for housing and we would have more space for parks, libraries, and greenery.

* High-rises block more of the sky, making it not seems as worthwhile to go outside.

* Mental detachment from the local area.

The second one is what I've only in the past year or so realized myself. I used to live on the 3rd floor of a 3-floor building, and my apartment had a front and back entrance. The front entrance went to inside stairs out to the front of the building, but the back entrance when straight outside to a wooden porch, then had wooden steps down to ground level. Where I am now, only on the 5th floor of 24, there's only one entrance, to a hallway where I take the elevator to go down and outside.

At my old place, I regularly went outside to do whatever on a whim. Nowadays, it's a really rare thing. And while there is a low-rise/high-rise correlation, I think it's the patio and the stairs, vs the hallway and the elevator that actually caused it. Having so much more distance between inside and outside creates an emotional distance where you don't even think about the outside, let alone decide whether or not to bother.

I've yet to live in one, but I'm thinking if the high-rises have balconies, it would create the same effect as that patio did for me.

> Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions whizzing past at speeds that will maim or kill you.

> There are a few places you can go from here. There are a few parks, where you can have some green space, along with the sound of the steel contraptions. There are other strips of concrete throughout the city between the contraptions' domain and the buildings. There are places you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time. There are places you are paid to be for some number of hours each day. And there's the public library if you can reach it.

You've actually described the typical suburb. Step outside your door into a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, and a shortly cut lawn, that you, at great expense of time, and money are allowed to maintain and inhabit (As long as you maintain it to the asinine, often environmentally-harmful expectations of your HOA/Municipality). Beyond that is a frequently sidewalk-less asphalt road, with two ton steel contraptions that are either stationary, or moving at speeds that will maim you.

There is nowhere you can go without getting into a car. (Corollary: Your neighbour will be driving home from the bar, every other Friday, drunk as a skunk.) The nearest park is a mile away. You have some green space you can look at, but its all owned by other people, and if you spend too long gawking at a stranger's yard, somebody might call the cops. [1] If you drive far enough, you may find dreary places where you can pay to be allowed to occupy for a time, called stripmalls. A few may even contain a library.

[1] Because only a criminal or a lunatic would be walking around in a suburb.

So they're the same in that they're different?

People just don't want to have children anymore, fertility rates have dropped a lot post-2012(smartphones and social media)

Indeed, car-intermediated everything and complete dependence on parents is a much better description of suburban life for children than city life. I grew up in one of the most pleasant and active suburbs in the US, in a little college town, and it was still incredibly child-hostile. The city is IMO much friendlier to children.

In the city people can and do walk all over, with longer trips made by transit. There are more small shops of all kinds, more coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more playgrounds, more museums, and in general more regular human contact of all kinds. Kids can be independent at a younger age, and can pursue a wider range of interests with community infrastructure and support.

> you have small children, this changes. Intellectual pursuits? They can't read yet, so your only option is parking them in front of videos.

I have one 3-year-old kid and one 5-month-old kid in San Francisco. Neither of them watches significant amounts of videos (occasionally we watch kids’ movies or old Mr. Rogers episodes together). The other kids we meet at the playground don’t seem to do excessive amounts of video watching.

Kids absolutely can do “intellectual pursuits”, but at their own level. First and foremost they play with all manner of physical objects – blocks, other construction toys, folded paper, empty cardboard boxes and yogurt containers, balls, sand, clay, water, their own bodies, ... Then kids love having stories told to them or books read to them. They love singing, using random household objects as percussion instruments, playing rhyming games, recognizing and naming objects, learning new words, counting random stuff, drawing with chalk and crayons, .... They love helping with household chores (not the most helpful at first, but they try), watching people do physical work of all kinds, play-acting all sorts of grown-up activities, ...

By far the biggest problem for small kids here in SF is the high cost of housing and childcare and the distance from grandparents. Many families we know have moved away to find places with cheaper housing (e.g. they were previously living in a rent-controlled 1 bedroom apartment and decided they wanted a 2-bedroom place, but couldn’t afford to pay current market rent for it) or more help with childcare.

> One false move and some yahoo in a steel contraption has killed them.

It would be great to ban cars from more streets, and get the remaining cars down to 15–20 miles/hour. This is not really a city problem per se; our whole society is built around cars, and suburbs are generally worse than cities at putting pedestrians in harm’s way.

So I have to tell my kid to ignore a syringe on the ground at a muni stop once in a while - like dangers don't also exist in suburban and rural areas - but poop barely phases us... it's like some of these folx have never woken up to their kid having taken a diaper off and smearing poop all over the crib

But the necessity for exposure to "near-term dangers" is a very American thing to say and I believe that it is wrong.

Yes, children growing up in big cities are more mature. And cynical. And depressed.

The irony of the situation is that big cities are so dangerous nowadays that parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised or to go anywhere by themselves until adolescence.

I grew up in a small city in the eighties and nineties (not in the US) and was walking home or to school, by myself, since I was 7 years old. The mentality back then for raising children was basically "make sure they do their homework and feed them once in a while". I now live in a big city and I couldn't do that with my son, because the environment is not the same. We live in a big city, but I still have to drive him everywhere, even though he's 9 years old.

Due to the mobility restrictions of the suburbs (everything can only reached by car) you as a parent are automatically managing more of the time of your kids: Picking them up at school, driving them to organized event 1 or 2 (sports for example) etc.

In the city it's easier for kids to do those things themselves: My kids went to school by themselves after a few weeks in first grade (school is only a few hundred meters away from home, though). This has a bunch of other consequences: They can autonomously meet peers earlier, so they have more free and unstructured time together etc. All in all less parental involvement, and the kids have to (and want to!) organize more by themselves.

Do you have any evidence? Or just a personal hunch?

> big cities are so dangerous nowadays

Big cities nowadays are dramatically safer than they were a few decades ago.

> parents no longer allow their children to play outside unsupervised

This is due to the parents’ paranoid fears, not the inherent danger involved.

You can't discount housing, because it's what gets you to live in a really small space, possibly in a dangerous neighborhood and with so much street noise that you can't sleep with your window open.

So yes, if you can't afford a nice place with plenty of room in a nice neighborhood, then SF is a terrible place to be raising a child.

Suburban playgrounds are way better than urban ones and the rest of your examples require a lot of money. I'm biased because I grew up in the suburbs, but playing sports outside for free like I did as a kid sounds much better than having to get job because the only thing you can do in the city outside of your house is pay for "culture" at "coffeeshops, more live music, more social clubs, more classes, more museums".

There is more of pretty much everything within a kid-accessible distance in the city, including tons and tons of free stuff. There are more and better parks and playgrounds. There are more publicly accessible athletic facilities. There are more and bigger free public libraries. The amazing museums have regular free days for residents, and zoo/aquarium/museum passes can often be checked out for free from the library. There are more free art exhibits. There are more cultural festivals. There are more special-interest meetup groups....

Plenty of city kids play pick-up (or organized) sports outside for fun for free every day.

I'm sure such places exist, but I've lived in a city (Boston) for many years and this description doesn't apply to the areas I've lived.

Somewhat ironically, the places in Boston that are closest to your description are the ones where they bulldozed large swaths and tried to remake things in a more people friendly way.

And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20116699.