Yea so great, until you are struck by a pandemic and your minimalist home is basically now a prison cell where you can't do much because everything there is to do was outside your tiny home.

Now I know people shitting on suburbs is the fashion, but the fact is if you are the kind of person who has hobbies that don't involve going out and socializing a bedroom community is perfect. You get your own land and a detached home with plenty of space to do mostly whatever you want. Woodwork, swimming in a pool, running around with your dog, playing loud music and movies, hosting dinner parties, whatever. It's so much more comfortable for people who don't have urges to just "hang out".

Why not both? Seriously though, suburbs would be a lot nicer if they were built on a human scale with amenities within walking distance rather than a sea of house bounded by freeways. You just need mixed zoning really, model it after a small town with fully detached housing surrounding a small core of low density apartments and shops. Rinse and repeat, call it a decentralized city or some such, maybe it'll catch on and get some planner's attention.

This sounds like how many places in the Netherlands are. A small town (1000-75000) often with an ancient core (ours dates back to 1300) with the church repurposed as a microbrewery, shops and apartments. Then around that core, ever more recently built houses with yards and a more affordable €/m2 price the further you move out. It puts bars, sports, parks, restaurants, groceries in walking and biking distance, often with bigger cities nearby for theatres, university, or more niche shopping, accessible via public transportation or cars in ~30min.

Two of the central themes drawing people to suburbs are space and privacy. I agree that more mixed use spaces in suburbs would be nice, but fundamentally I don't think you are going to do away with cars in most suburban environments because I don't you can achieve the business density necessary to do so without sacrificing lot size and privacy.

I don't think you should do away with cars, we need them for efficient transport and whenever we need to travel longer distances. I just think we should build with both cars and people in mind. Most North American suburbs are focused solely on cars and houses with no provision for mixed use. I think the zoning is more to blame than cars for the current dire conditions.

The Netherlands does this really well.

This.

I love in a sea of houses. Bu where I live I can take 30 minute walk to the doctor, or ironically, the gas station.

I think for that to work you need a strong public transport system (regular daily, frequent enough and comprehensive) as well as having multi-purpose buildings so that companies are mixed in housing, as well as green places and areas for people to meet, sit chat and go shopping.

Doctors, dentists, hairdressers, cafes, bakeries and flower shops all fit nicely with housing.

I live in the burbs with some amenities being walking distance. People are still very isolated and segregated. I'm not sure it can be fixed except to allow easy access through public transportation to more dense, walkable areas. Strong driving culture as well. Save for a few strip malls on main drags, suburbia is a big box dystopia. Anyway yes zoning is probably the most important thing, though people are out here for the (comparatively) larger lots and houses.

> your minimalist home is basically now a prison cell

Went home for Christmas and as part of it swung by the nursing home where my Grandma lives.

She is basically in actual prison for the past nine months. For a good part of it she was confined to her room. It appears that they've relaxed the restrictions after Coronavirus ripped through the place and everyone that didn't die is now immune. She is at least allowed to go sit in the lobby area now and talk with the other residents.

Nothing quite like watching a 98 year old woman break down in tears every time someone reminds her that she can't actually come outside and give us a hug or talk to us in person.

Why not break her out I have an 85 year old grandma living with me an its fine...

She has moderate dementia, which means you can't really trust her to do reasonable things if left to her own devices.

> everyone that didn't die is now immune

How do they know?

If they've recovered, they're immune. If you weren't immune, you couldn't recover - it's the same system.

The only question is how long-lasting it is, and so far the answer is "indefinite / a long time".

Other people have caught it and recovered, but it was not known whether that gave them immunity. What's different here? In fact, some people have caught it twice, so you can obviously recover without gaining immunity.

But if they suddenly start dying

“Huh well that was interesting”

so honestly theyll say whatever is convenient. nobody knows anything, nobody has any plan, we’ll see

Who said anything about a minimalist home? While a little smaller, our place has a much better build quality than our "stick built" suburban US home (that we still own and rent out - and it requires wayyyy more maintenance). It overlooks a large park (that contains walking paths, statues, water features, skateboard park, various sports courts, outdoor exercise park and even a climbing wall. Additionally, we have a view of the bay and mountains.

Within 5-10 min walking distance we have all daily activity requirements like grocery stores, gyms, pharmacies, restaurants, bars, schools, large year-round indoor swimming pool that blows away any private pool that I've seen, etc. If I did want a car we have underground parking or I could buy a private garage in a self-storage warehouse type area nearby for parking it or using as a hobby workshop. The one thing I do miss is being able to crank up my electric guitar, still looking for a solution to that one. Maybe a music space that rents by the hour or something.

I don't miss the car centric lifestyle for a second, and I'm saying this as an amateur race car driver. With all the time I used to spend driving around for the most basic of activities, I now have much more time available for my family, hobbies, side projects or even the occasional nap. You can't buy this quality of life anywhere in the US at any price or income level.

Who said anything about minimalist or tiny homes? There's a wide middle ground between a 25 square meter shoebox apartment and a grotesque 230 square meter "family" home.

Thank you for speaking up. You're responding to a comment that angrily assumes some unspoken characteristics about "cities built for humans, and not for cars."

I am a reluctant, but accomplished touring cyclist, and I've ridden hundreds of miles through American landscape that is positively hostile to pedestrians and vehicles operating at less-than-car scales. The assumption of cars has led urban designers to implement travel distances that are only grueling to traverse, and the interstitial spaces are inhospitable, bedecked with exhaust ports, bad lighting, narrow spaces or vast, entirely unfurnished without shade, let alone water or public facilities for miles, even, in larger towns. Sometimes, just crossing the street to go a kilometer I've found the American cityscape impassable without hopping in the car, and popping over a minimum of one (1) freeway exit.

That's just one aspect of the alien dimensions to which our environment's built.

I visited a University in America having lived outside America for 5 years. I walked from the University to the theater 2km away to see a movie. It felt like I was going to die even with a sidewalk next to the high way.

Similar story. The old Apple Maps icon was where the N De Anza Boulevard crossed over the Junipero Serra Freeway. Center of the old icon [0] was One Infinite Loop, top left of the icon was the Cupertino Hotel.

Going from the Cupertino Hotel to One Infinite Loop on foot felt like I was risking life and limb, despite it having pedestrian lights [1].

[0] http://thetrendler.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Maps-Icons...

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZMBq8RzpZLc6xwM97

Visiting Plano, Texas (which I really enjoyed) - our hotel was just over the road from the business we were visiting.

That road was a 3-lanes-each-way road with no pedestrian crossing points. We just had to run across when there was a gap. It wasn't a fast road - there were plenty of traffic lights for traffic purposes - but still, nothing for pedestrians.

230 m^2 isn’t uncommon in the US, and there’s plenty that are double. We do have “basements” that sometimes are finished and can be counted against the size, but are generally used to much larger homes than elsewhere.

This is why nothing is walking distance

Specifically in 2019 the average single family home was 2611 sq ft, apartments 1156 sq ft, acc’d to

https://themreport.com/daily-dose/09-02-2020/as-more-stay-ho...

I question their numbers. How many bedrooms are in that 1156-square-foot apartment? At least three? I've lived in several two-bedroom apartments throughout my life in areas with a relatively low cost of living, and they ranged from about 650 to about 900 square feet in area. The latter felt unnecessarily spacious.

So either the source claims that the average apartment has three or more bedrooms (and this is false, very few 3BR+ apartments are built in most buildings), or that the average apartment offers palatial luxury. Maybe they miscalculated?

I respectfully request to cease comments of the type of "weeps in x". You don't have to honor this request, but I would feel better without reading these.

The brevity is pretty unique but lets see what would be conveyed by honoring that wish

Translation: "As someone that lives in desirable parts of high cost of living areas, even the largest premium units are below the average square footage mentioned in that article, I generally try not to think about it but it is fascinating to see, I think I can relate to other people that earn enough to comfortably live in these areas, but it is not common to ever talk about being financially stable in an expensive area, lets go back to pretending that we are all struggling and 'got a good deal' on our 900 sq ft penthouse."

That's an absurd size for a home.

"230 square meters" is about the size of the average new home being built in the US.

Yes.

From europe, this rings very true.

I wanted to get a larger house with a garden before the pandemic (which is ridiculously expensive given the rent / value ratio in Europe is a joke) and the pandemics reinforced that tenfolds.

How long before the government lock us in our tiny homes again?

How many pandemics have we had in our lifetime ?

This is like saying buy a Hummer for that one off road drive you take in a decade and suffer its drawbacks for 99% of your use case.

Have vast sprawling houses protected US from COVID-19 ?

Let's make data driven decisions please.

Someone needs to read The Black Swan, quick.

The problem of relying too much on "data-driven decisions" is that it leads to absurd optimizations that make the overall system more fragile.

We had only one pandemic in our lifetime, yet. But don't forget about Avian Flu and Swine Flu also happened and caused concern less than 10 years ago. The world is way more connected and we never had so many people being able to go across the world spreading a virus in less than 24h. The likelihood of another pandemic threat is increasing with time, not decreasing.

If anything, one of the lessons that I hope we take from this year is that we need to think our environments (on all scales, from the bedrooms in our homes to our cities and schools for our kids and the city altogether) for robustness and longevity, not for cost, practicality or marketability.

It looks like other people have got the message.

https://eurocities.eu/stories/reclaiming-the-streets/

and an article in the Guardian about Barcelona https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...

I'm personally heartened by people's moves to de-focus the car in urban places.