So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit.

[0] I've received (Swedish?) downvotes for this contention before - Swedish-speaking readers can see https://www.cyklistbloggen.se for good documentation.

> So any [...] as some sort of [sarcastic overstatement] is really just idealized bullshit.

You made the pH of this discussion noticeably more acidic with this swipe, and the parent did not deserve it. It's not hard to make comments in a swipe-free way—for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105572 is making a similar point to yours in a conversational style, as opposed to a cross-examining one. That's what we're going for here.

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

Or that is just a strawman of what is clearly true, but not literally universal in every single individual location. Biking/walking is utilized at least twice as much in Western European countries as in the US, and often 3 times or more [1]. European cities are, in general, more walkable and bikeable than US cities. If you want to read an in depth article about the many factors that led to US urban sprawl vs European cities, I’d recommend [2].

[1] http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews280western...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-europes-cities-better...

What's it look like when you include eastern Europe in that comparison?

I'm sure the rich half of the US bikes a heck of a lot more than the poor half too.

I often think of a time in Sofia, Bulgaria where I saw an elderly woman trying to get around a car parked on the sidewalk, up against a wall, by walking on the car bumper with her groceries. It was terrifying and precarious.

Ouch, a bit harsh, that. I did not intend to claim Europe does not have unwalkable areas, but that walkable areas are not considered as such novelties. I should have used a more cautious tone.

Never the less, using Helsinki as an example, you can plan to purchase an apartment within one hours of commute from the Helsinki center and never get a car, as there are sufficient amount of neigbourhoods that facilitate that, even though every possible combination of housing and employment does not support not owning a car.

When you have to go home by midnight as a student / young professional living outside the city because public transport service ends (or even before that because you don't want to get stranded), or you live somewhere off the beaten path, or even the other party lives off the beaten path a little, getting a car to drive at least a part of that becomes more and more enticing.

I say this knowing that improving public transport to reduce the number of roads and cars on the road has been a topic for a few decades now, and even the most obvious national lines aren't being funded in my country, whereas there is money to create more roads and maintain older roads. I don't doubt The Netherlands is far better than the US, but while possible, there are still tons of hurdles to overcome in going car-less. Japan is another example, where the cities do it much better than we do, but the outskirts arguably do it worse.

In Västerås i lived in the rural outskirts when I was younger and missing the 2am bus meant I had to wait until 6am but I think it only happened once to me.

I also lived in Houston, Texas. I never took the bus because it would take 45 min to walk to the nearest stop. Biking was fun though because I lived near a large reserve but there was always the fear of getting hit by a boar or bit by something poisonous.

In Västerås walking or biking was always easy and felt integrated to the planning of the city. In Houston you had to seek out special areas where it would be nice to walk or ride your bike.

The only way I can understand someone complaining about the lack of such options in Northern Europe is that they haven't lived elsewhere, and seen how bad it could be.

My favorite personal US-is-for-cars anecdote: We once got into cars just to drive across the road, as there was no pedestrian crossing and six lanes of traffic.

https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.2791313,24.9709347,3a,75y,66....

There is usually a bike and pedestrian way also, and there are buses going there too. But it's not human scale. The inside is divorced from the outside. In the winter it's a pretty noir experience as you visit these places after you get out of work, when you need to buy some lumber etc. It's dark and it rains, it's +1 C, there's a highway close by and the orange light from street lights and the car head and tail lights are lighting up the place. Salty water and brown sleet is splashing there from the large mass of cars driving around, and the constant noise from the studded tires. There is no cover, no trees, nothing living really except some barely struggling grass on some traffic dividers. These are built outside city centers, near the outer ring roads. Land is cheap. It used to be a field 30 years ago.

And vice versa, some places in America are just like some nice places in Europe, like a lot of Boston.

But that's not true on the roads. We teach children to literally fear for their lives around cars. Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human. They can't express themselves, which leads to anger and road rage. They can't feel the speed they are travelling at or the effort it is taking. And we just let them assume priority. They've taken the roads for themselves and they are not going to give them back.

https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...

Can you please come and do the same in Austria, this boomer-mentality country that's all about everyone owing cars and driving and parking everywhere, where cycling is seen as a sport or means of transportation for poor people who can't afford a house in the suburbs?

For a history of how this happened in the US see Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city by Peter Norton.

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic

It's not cultural, motorized traffic wins because it's more powerful.

> Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human.

Subways, trams and buses will also kill them, that's just as dangerous.

Do you have any source for this? AFAIK it's not true. Trams and subways specifically kill way less people than cars, even though in many places they transport more people than cars do.

For buses, IDK, but i would be surprised if a single bus was twice as likely or more to kill a person than a car. And a single bus transports way more people than a car.

And still we have expansive shopping malls outside of town which is heavily in favor or cars. We still have the downtown shopping but it can barely hang by, and parking is very expensive. It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities. They do exist here, but are very small. So you can often get by with walking of bicycling but the "big" shopping is done using a car, the local shops are 99% food-related or restaurants.

But this is a matter of chosen-lifestyle.

This was really brought home to me talking to my mother-in-law (who lives in Nyköping). She is a keen walker and owns a bike - but when I ranted about the incredible scale of traffic in what is a small and should be an eminently walkable town, she said "How else can people buy their weekly groceries?"

The point of walkable towns (which these small and quite intimate towns in central Sweden could be), is that the center of town would be full of flourishing small and specialized grocery and other stores, and people would buy food from their nearby store, and keep the center of the town alive and busy.

Instead of this, people prefer to sit alone in their car and drive at a snail's pace in a polluting traffic-jam, to a stadium-sized parking-lot where anonymous super-grocery chains are located out of reach of the 'poors' who have no car, and therefore no means of getting there.

Right. The change only works when you switch to a model of buying your daily groceries, because the market is close, and smaller, and quick to get in and out of. You may still make a weekly or bi-weekly trip to the big market in a car to get bulk stuff, but each day's meals are based around the perishables that you bought earlier that day or the day before.

(Yes, this is hard, and it only worked for us when we lived in Chicago, and the market was a few blocks away or we passed by grocers on the way to and from work, but it was a nice way to live.)

Driving to buy groceries may be necessary today, but maybe not tomorrow.

From Ruth Cowan's More Work for Mother: "Butchers, greengrocers, coffee merchants, and bakers employed delivery boys to take order from and then carry purchases back to the homes of their more prosperous customers. Smoked, dried, and pickled fish, fruits and vegetables, second-hand clothing, and linens were routinely sold from pushcarts that lined the curbs and traveled the back alleys of poor neighborhoods."

I'm in London, and use Ocado, which means if I can't even be bothered to open the app to decide what to order they'll populate the order for me based on my favourites and my past shops. I know I'll get something that's generally "close enough". When I can be bothered to open the app, I have a starting point that's ~90% right. My weekly shop takes me ~5 minutes.

I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping - or pretty much any shopping - myself again. Ever. The exception is the very occasional urge, usually if I'm going for a walk anyway, or want something extra. But even most sudden urges is so much more convenient to handle via Deliveroo or similar.

The big out-of-town supermarkets will die soon enough, and be replaced by warehouses. The shift to deliveries has been steady in the UK at least. Small town centre grocery stores might survive to some extent for that occasionally extra shop.

One less reason to want to own a car for me at least.

I know, same here, it's so great. I used to have an annoying 30min detour 3 times per week, and now I do my grocery shopping on the phone for 5mins while I'm commuting. The time I save has gone into more cooking, and healthier meals. Delivery is definitely better than using a car. Nobody that already has a full time job should have to put up with such annoying chores.

But delivery services, and services related to house work has a big stigma in northern Europe, people think it's really important that "everyone cleans up their own mess" and you should not be able to "buy your way out". You see CEO:s in companies having kitchen duty doing dishes to get brownie points and you often get very negative reactions to using such services.

Personally don’t believe the supermarkets will go away. I don’t think the business model of these delivery platforms allows having qualified staff to do the shopping.

Ocado is increasingly licensing their warehousing platform internationally, so it's likely to show up near you.

I'd agree with you if we were talking about staff picking from a shop floor - that does not work reliably enough at all, but that model is several years outdated and the only reason some of those still survive is that the more automated systems like Ocado's and a few others are a lot more capital intensive to roll out as it means building dedicated specialized warehouses.

Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

Personally I prefer shopping in person anyway. It’s not a big deal once a week and usually have multiple errands to run anyway.

I don't agree that it's straying from the topic. The shift towards getting groceries delivered is likely to start to kill off the big out-of-town super markets in certain markets, and it fundamentally changes the dynamics where grocery shopping was a big factor for people living in areas with few walkable shops with respect to their real or perceived need for cars.

E.g. my mums neighbourhood in Norway is one she'd likely have had to move away from when she gets a bit older than now if it wasn't for delivery services. She's close-ish to shops, but not close enough to be comfortable carrying lots of groceries any more. Having delivery services means the neighbourhood remains walkable enough for her for longer.

> Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

No, my weekly shop is delivered by salaried drivers. They're not paid great (I've checked), but they're certainly not paid as poorly as the typical gig worker and thankfully they've recently been forced to up salaries to deal with the ongoing lack of delivery drivers in the UK. My very occasional extras via Deliveroo are delivered by gig workers, and I'm conscious they're paid shit so I generally tip heavily.

Personally I utterly hate shopping in person unless it's something that I like to look at, and I'm very happy to pay extra to avoid having to.

But to bring it back to the topic, if having someone deliver groceries takes away the main reason why people otherwise need a car, it's a net win. For me it e.g. makes a big difference in where I'd be prepared to live as I don't need to take into consideration whether it'd be a long walk with heavy bags any more. I enjoy long walks. I don't enjoy long walks with bags full of groceries.

Back in the states, I shop for groceries daily (again, choosing to live in a semi urban area with two grocery stores in easy walking distance) after dropping the toddler off at daycare. A stroller works wonders. Not sure how I will shop after he starts kindergarten next year.

Only if delivery was organized in a way to deliver to multiple households in the same area does it start to make sense from an ecological perspective: but your neighbourhood still has to have those delivery trucks in the walking/biking paths.

It's a bit like a bus vs. a car. They're not equal, even if they both drive on the same roads.

Despite the social consequences.

Ir seems to imply that it is a demand that technology not change things socially or if they will be bad. Both are flat out impossible as the inventor(s) don't even know what will change ahead of time. It is neither reasonable nor actionable.

If it doesn't imply that it is meaningless as the dumb luddite line "Science never sacrifices, it always murders." How the fuck is a process of discovery supposed to sacrifice anything when it isn't even an entity! Attributing responsibility of murders to it is similiarly daft - why not blame murders on violence instead?

Sure scientests should come out with ethical codes of "what not to do" after infamous incidents like say Harry Harlowe's gratitutousness monkey torture or human experimentation on the vulnerable but moral culpability is on the men responsible, not those who engage in a common different process. It would nonsensic like trying to declare eaters responsible for some depraved cannibal eating an infant!

If your only or main KPI ignores the social consequences , then you're doing it

> Despite de social consequences.

But I get your point, it's a well known school of thought based on selfishness, I'd guess.

What’s “bullshit” is using the example of satellite malls, a global phenomenon due to obvious reasons (land and real estate pricing) as somehow proof that Sweden or similar countries aren’t walkable, without mentioning the huge divide in the feasibility of using public transport.

It’s not equal if a mall is kilometers away from the city center, but in one case you have public transport available and in the other it’s for all practical purposes impossible to get there without a car.

In addition to that, even locations outside the city center are often safely walkable, if you would want to. This comes down to a difference in city planning and the assumed value of pedestrian traffic. I seriously don’t understand how that can be a contentious point, it’s well known that city planning in the US is more car-centric than that in Europe, and that consistent public transport is almost unheard of in the US outside of large cities. That doesn’t mean all of the US is impossible to access without a car, nor does it mean all of Europe is possible without one, but the difference in planning is completely obvious.

In smaller cities, you often have the same people setting lofty ambitions to become the bicycle capital of united federation of planets while at the same time greenlighting yet another massive mall at the edge of town because "oh my god $BIG_CHAIN_STORE wants to come here, we're gonna be like a big city now!", usually at the expense of the stores that are accessible by foot or by bicycle.

That's why 85% of German households own a car, even though many of their cities are more walkable. Being more walkable doesn't get you to being car free, it gets you to fewer miles driven. But if your goal is to be car free then you need to focus on a lot more than getting groceries.

But as long as a large majority have cars, you are going to have a car focused city, which is exactly what most European cities are once you get out of the touristy downtown areas. So at best the walkability metric will give you a small downtown area that is not car-focused. That downtown area will be populated primarily by tourists, and most locals will live outside it, in a more car accessible part of the city.

I listen to French people in documentaries and podcasts who can't go five minutes without using an analogy about cars and garages.

You can walk in the suburbs but there’s often no where local to go because the shops, schools, and workplaces need a level of scale to be efficient.

This is actually bullshit.

Europe is fundamentally more walkable, it's not even an argument.

Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD).

The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and homeowners so governments can never let the prices drop (e.g. by embracing the abundance of development proposed in this article).

Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value:

People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage payments, since it's basically free money - For those that can get a mortgage, since it's pretty much mandatory to pay 20% of the cost upfront (plus taxes).

Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material.

Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food.

These companies are invested in precisely because these are basic needs. The company gets the capital it needs to operate, consumers get a reliable supply of food, energy, and clothing, employees get steady jobs providing these staples, investors get a relatively safe store of value and some income. Who exactly loses in these investments in supply basic food, energy, and consumer staples?

>companies that grow or sell food.

House builders would be the analogous party to that. The parent comment is describing landlords, specifically part-time landlords who buy up family homes and turn them into rental properties. Your analogy doesn't apply to those landlords.

A landlord is in the same business but for housing: buying in bulk (in this case in the time dimension) and selling a shorter time period’s worth of housing.

There is no other physical necessity sold on a time dimension. I cannot rent you water, or rent you food. Once the grocery store has sold a certain amount of food, they have to re-enter the market and buy more. Once a gas station has sold a certain amount of gas, they have to re-enter the market and buy more. Once a sub-developer has sold a certain number of homes, they have to re-enter the market and buy more.

A landlord does not. A landlord is not the same thing.

Seriously, what is your proposal for how it should work? Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so (unless they just like having housing with no real downside investment risk).

So what would they do without a landlord? If the builders didn't have people to sell the property to, they wouldn't build them and the housing just wouldn't exist.

It's actually quite the opposite. By literal definition, every renter that's paying their rent can already afford the housing they currently occupy, because every renter is already paying for (their entire unit) as well as (all cost of maintenance) and (some extra profit for the landlord)

So by definition, every renter is always already paying more than it would cost to own, operate, and maintain their unit. Every renter on the planet (who isn't like, behind on rent) has already proven they have the financial resources to own their unit.

> So what would they do without a landlord?

Save money every month. (By the exact amount of profit the landlord currently makes).

A landlord can make a profit charging rent that would not even cover the mortgage payment if the tenant bought it.

That seems unlikely to hold true.

But yeah, generally speaking, adults should be able to own their buy and own their own housing, and be able to reside there as long as they choose to. For the same reasons we expect people to be able to own their own coats and shoes and laptops and such, and hold on to it as long as they are alive. And if people change jobs or move to a new city or start a family or whatever, they sell their old one and buy the new one.

That is unlikely to be affordable or practical for 18 year old high-school graduates starting work or starting college away from home.

If instead of requiring people to pay for the perpetual right to occupy and exclude others, you allow them to pay for that right for only one year or one month at a time, well, that’s what renting already is.

No, that's what property taxes are -- and they're already paid out little bits at a time. (Here, twice yearly). Rent vs buy has nothing to do with the "right to occupy", the taxes do, and renters and owners both pay their property taxes in full (renters taxes are rolled up into their monthly rent, but same thing).

---

Every benefit a landlord offers is a lie -- it's a benefit the renter setup, and the landlord is stealing credit for. A landlord does not "maintain" any property (the renter does, the renter pays money that gets spent on a property management service that does the work). A landlord does not pay any taxes for the land (the renter does, through monthly rents). A landlord did not build the structure on the property (a construction firm did, using money exclusively paid for by current and future renters). A landlord does not protect the property from risk or damage (the homeowners insurance / property insurance company does that, paid for entirely from monthly rents from the renter tenant).

You could potentially argue that the landlord is a bank, a form of financing to get money upfront and paid back later -- except they don't do that either, the Federal Government does that through a mortgage that the landlord just gets to hold for no reason, so the landlord usually isn't even risking any finances there either. A default doesn't leave a landlord high-and-dry, it leaves the general public (through the Federal Government) holding the bag.

The landlord doesn't even take on any opportunity cost risk in the US, because the US soft-mandates (though fiscal policy) that property values continuously rise on average, and passes this cost on to citizens. So, even if hypothetically all renters abandon the property in a few years, the landlord will be able to 'cash out' (sell) the property, nearly always for more than they paid for it (using appreciation paid for by past renters).

A landlords choice is literally "do I do nothing and get free money forever for no labour" or "do I cash out now, and dump the money into some other place, for the chance at more free money for no labour". That's the only "opportunity cost" they ever have to weigh.

The landlord *literally* *does* *nothing*, they provide *literally* *zero* value. They exist solely to skim money from people. It's a political choice to let these people exist and take the bulk of earned value from a given area, not some kind of need-based response to anything.

My parents were (very) small-time landlords having 0, 1, or 2 houses (or half-houses) at the time while I was growing up.

The reason that I’ve stayed away from doing it is that I saw firsthand just how much work it actually is, notwithstanding the claims from people (almost invariably never-landlords) about how easy it is.

There's no direct food analogy but I don't think it's too stretched

Is that how it works in Europe? In Michigan, landlords mostly exist to prevent maintenance, and extract money.

The thing is, housing is a surprisingly flexible commodity (too expensive, people live with parents/share, and then move back out if prices fall) , and encouraging everyone to buy a full on house in a suburb is a recipe to drive expensive housing.

Even with good tenants, a tenant means you have more responsibility w.r.t repairs/maintenance costs etc.

If the property is appreciating at 10-30% yoy, why take the risk of renting it?

No, but a landlord who got into the market early when properties were dirt cheap can leverage that and buy more and more for renting them out, reducing the supply and increasing the competition if you want to buy your first property and not be a renter your whole life. You know, like when you want to settle down and have kids, you're gonna be out-muscled by a landlord who already has 3 properties and is is looking to buy 2 more.

>housing is a surprisingly flexible commodity (too expensive, people live with parents/share, and then move back out if prices fall)

The thing is this is one of the reason why birth rates are so low in rich western cities. How can you expect people to start families if you expect adults to live in shared accomodations or move in with their parents?

Having access to cheap, spacious housing that's just for living and not part of someone's investment vehicle, would definitely make "nesting" an enticing proposition for young adults, like it was for the boomer generation. But if you expect them to bum around between living with roommates and living with their parents like adolescents, and their only hope of nesting being to grind away after years in university at some soul-sucking job 40+ hours/week plus commutes just to afford a bank loan for a shoe-box that they'll have to pay off till they die, then of course they'll realize this expectation of their life is a scammy wage-salve trap and say "to hell with that, I'd rather stay single, childless and free and spend my time and money on travelling, clubbing, netflix, meme-stocks and videogames".

But of course, fat chance to get governments to admit their policies of enriching the banks, property investors and the older owning class by squeezing the young is the cause of this. To them, the real reason why the young can't afford to settle down is because "these pesky millennials and zoomers spend all their money on iphones and avocado toast, so to fix this we'll allow uncontrolled mass immigration from the third world".

Housing can't be an affordable necessity for starting a family that everyone should have access to while at the same time being an investment vehicle design to enrich their owners. It's either one or the other and most of the west has chosen the latter while talking how the former is more important.

In Austria, the goverment isn't even hiding the fact that housing is officially an investment vehicle, with the conservative party throwing the blame back on the people for not having bought properties as the reason why they stay poor and can't afford to keep up with rent increases. Despicable!

Nobody wants to ban companies from building and selling houses. Buying them and keeping them as investment vehicles is something else entirely.

I don't think requiring anyone who wants housing to be financially able to buy an entire home is sensible, meaning that some entity needs to be in the business of paying for more housing than they personally need to allow people to have housing who can't or don't want to buy an entire dwelling unit.

Maybe you want the government to have a monopoly on that activity, but someone needs to provide it or you end up with far less access to housing and far more people living on the street than currently.

Companies providing and selling food are providing a service. Large investors that buy in bulk, keeping new hosing out of the market to keep prices high, are not really providing anything - they are just a different kind of consumer.

I would make a parallel with the relation between gamers and bitcoin miners in the graphic cards market: miners can pay more and buy in bulk, which makes prices rise and prices out gamers. Only in this case, the people who are being priced out are no longer able to cover a basic need.

Capital and leverage.

Wealthy and access to capital can build, rent and make giant returns.

Students paying off debt cannot even get the minimum down payment.

If everyone rented, and, if transition costs were very simple i.e. you could 'jump homes with ease' - then this would be less of a problem.

Also I would add stability. A government job which can be had for life, they will get a mortgage. A private sector worker or freelancer, may have blips in income, a bad blip means no mortgage payment which is very bad.

The consistency required for 25 years of paying off something lends power to the entrenched kinds of workers.

This is huge. My wife and I are pretty privileged and own a very modest fixer-upper home on the very edge of a coastal metro area. We somehow managed this only after a decade of paying off ~150k of student loans that our parents encouraged us to take out when we were effectively children.

I have friends who are software engineers who own big houses in the city who skipped a 4 year degree altogether or their parents were able to pay for their education.

The difference between them and me? They were able to pocket that 150k as opposed to giving it to some useless university administrators and various federal lenders.

Some states regulate residential housing, or at least taxes on it, to limit what municipalities and counties may do with their taxing authority. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to regulate the rents charged by "housing provider" individuals or companies to be, on average, 1/3 of average local income.

The economy exists to support everyone's life, not the other way around. Just because you can argue someone can make a quick buck selling a basic necessity, that does not mean it's ok to deprive a whole community of basic necessities.

Take for example water. Would it be ok to hold everyone hostage over access to it, and even lobby for municipalities to stop the public sector from encroaching onto a service provided by a private business, just because Nestle and the likes bottle and sell it?

The current delta between the have and have-nots, and the profound impact that "small" real estate investments have on pushing access to housing far out of reach of your average middle and upper-middle class family, is a collosal social and economical red flag. Access to housing has a profound impact on everyone's lives and even community. You accept jobs based on access to housing, and the amount of time wasted supporting said job is time eaten away from the time you spend doing far more important things like caring for your children and family. Being deprived from that just because a faceless investor wanted to park his bailout money somewhere and decided to dump it in real estate hurts society.

The market isn't a magical entity which demands human sacrifices. It's quite possible to keep it reigned in with a combination of banning private property investments[1] with public housing and urban renewal projects. Cut down on detrimental demand and increase supply.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768

It's easy to see how this works when an investor is the first owner. If it weren't for the initial investor with the required capital and/or credit to make the purchase, the housing likely wouldn't have been built in the first place.

Now you may ask, what is the role of investors who buy up older properties? They provide valuable liquidity to the market, which provides an incentive for the initial investors to invest. Both investors and regular homeowners alike prefer to own a property that they can easily sell on short notice if needed. Without investors buying up "second-hand" properties, it would be harder to sell a property making homes a less attractive investment. Fewer people would buy new properties, resulting in less new housing being built.

All of this extra development spurred by investment money pouring in leads to lower rents for everyone since rents are pure supply/demand. If you build more, rents will go down.

If you build more, rents will go down. ===> In theory True. In practice self builds lower the pricing. The barriers set by bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy are the problem and they cause property prices to go up. EDIT: Restrictions set by bureaucracy is what creates artificial scarcity(think diamonds market)

"They provide valuable liquidity to the market" ===> False. It's long term value storage and/or speculation. The same properties would be bought by new families if they were closer to a realistic price. You'd get the same if not more cash movement if it would be affordable. By affordable I mean: A young couple with minimum wage should be able to pay it off in 10-15 years with no problems. Not in 35-50.

As a sidenote(IMHO): Ideally, property ownership should be limited to 1/+18 year old to prevent/reduce speculations. Maybe 2 if we're talking about adding a holiday home(yeah. I know it's a strech). Companies should not be alowed to own residential properties unless they are a developer. In that case, they can own the newly developed properties for up to ?5? years.

No. The market pays investors if they managed to allocate capital well, and takes away their money if they happened to misallocate it. The investors take on a risk of loosing their money if their investment goes bad. This is how capitalism is so successful. Investors who make good decisions grow richer and that allows them make more good decisions on how to allocate capital, creating a positive feedback loop. Investors who make bad decisions go broke and that prevents them from misallocating any more capital.

> If you build more, rents will go down. ===> In theory True. In practice self builds lower the pricing. The barriers set by bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy are the problem and they cause property prices to go up. EDIT: Restrictions set by bureaucracy is what creates artificial scarcity(think diamonds market)

I'm all for small government and cutting down on bureaucracy.

> As a sidenote(IMHO): Ideally, property ownership should be limited to 1/+18 year old to prevent/reduce speculations. Maybe 2 if we're talking about adding a holiday home(yeah. I know it's a strech). Companies should not be alowed to own residential properties unless they are a developer. In that case, they can own the newly developed properties for up to ?5? years.

That's exactly the kind of regulation that prevents efficient capital allocation and leads to increased pricing.

Don't take this the wrong way mate but this is exactly the sort of mentality that led to this situation in the first place.

Keep in mind this comes from someone that owns 8 fully paid off flats (going 9 next year) and a good sized house(enough for a family of 6-7) in the country side with 50HA of arable land+forest. I am not complaining about the current laws or that it bothered me in any way. I'm saying that current laws+ speculation are keeping youngsters away from owning a property in a reasonable ammount of time. The way I see it, they live with a chain around their neck for 1 lousy house with cardboard walls.

"The market pays investors" ---> Stakeholders pay investors for sucessful speculation(in other words - investment)

I am a part of the young demographic you're talking about, so I have experienced the (compared to my parent's time) inflated prices first hand. I only own one investment property (in a large city) so far and it's mostly debt.

If you scroll down a little bit you'll see that in another comment I have written that I think the high prices of today are caused mostly by the influx of young people into cities. It is for the most part simply a case of having too many people wanting to live in a limited geographic area. In particular, they want amenities and jobs which tend to be concentrated in big cities.

The only way out is to either build more (with much higher density) increasing the capacity of existing cities or to revitalize small towns as hubs for remote workers with all the amenities they want. As it stands right now, even with remote work on the rise, myself included (I have a fully remote job yet I choose to live in an expensive city), not too many people my age would want to live in a small town their parents or grandparents may have happily lived their whole lives in.

The reason I believe that is the case is that rents are expensive too. Speculation may affect property prices, but it does not lead to increased rent prices. That is barring a few extremes where people buy housing for investment and don't rent it out or live there, which fortunately doesn't seem to be too common -- just take a walk outside in the evening and you'll get a good idea of how many houses/apartments are lived in. In general property tax is designed to prevent this.

Bad policies like rent control may lead to inflated rents (cheap rents for original residents only mean much higher rents for everyone else), but you do see high rents even in cities without such bad policies.

As a landlord, I charge market rent. I'm happy to lower it if I have trouble finding a tenant, as even an absurdly low amount is much better for me than having the property be empty -- I have a mortgage to pay. So far I haven't had to. In fact, the current tenant offered to pay me more rent than what I had originally listed the property for in exchange for me making some minor improvements to the property! I was more than happy to oblige.

--

There's one more factor making the situation look worse than it is -- low interest rates. People often calculate how many average annual salaries it takes to buy a place and compare that with the past, but I believe that is not the right metric to look at.

The right metric to look at should be yearly interest as a percentage of one's annual salary. In theory, if the interest rate is cut in half (i.e. from 2% to 1%) you'd expect home prices to effectively double since one can pay the same amount of interest to own a place twice as expensive.

This doesn't quite happen in reality, because when home prices rise, even when accompanied by lower interest rates, a mortgage usually requires a down payment which does scale linearly with the house price along with the principal you are required to pay every month.

You'd be right to point out that this does disproportionately affect younger and less wealthy people, since the more wealth you have, the less you have to rely on traditional mortgages -- you could borrow against your stock portfolio for example, and only pay interest, in which case the interest rate being cut in half indeed does let you own twice as much house with the same cash flow. Of course, you do need to be prepared to weather the storm that may come should the interest rate start rising again, which is precisely why it would be too risky for banks to let the average Joe do something like that -> hence a down payment and monthly principal repayment is required for most mortgages.

I'm not sure what's the best way of solving this. Ideally, your average young person should be able to buy twice the house when the interest rate is halved, but they do need to be shielded from the risk of the interest rate suddenly going up somehow. The government stepping in as a guarantor would likely lead to moral hazard deforming the market which I'm not a fan of. I'm of the opinion that interest rates are mostly determined by the broader market and large secular trends like demographics and technological advancement, as opposed to central bankers, so I don't think this can be solved by attempting to manipulate the interest rate either.

Overall I think the first problem of housing scarcity which is reflected in rent prices is a much bigger issue and solving that would help lessen the effects of the second one.

What you say amounts to "without rich people to pay every time they do some work poor people wouldn't be able to build houses". I don't buy it. I think it's perfectly possible to organise society without the driving force being "how can we as a society benefit this tiny cadre of super-rich people without pissing-off everyone else enough that they revolt".

Of course you need to wrest control from the people who can buy "mind control", and vote to allow corruption from the ruling party (cf UK parliament yesterday).

>All of this extra development spurred by investment money pouring in leads to lower rents for everyone //

The more we give to the rich the cheaper everything will be for us plebs, yeah, you're going to have to spend a bit more on your PR to press that idea home.

Countries ranking at the top have had a few decades of government provided homes (communist countries).

Now, they are not the most prosperous countries in the world, but my theory is that it's exactly because there is not as big a pressure to work just to have a roof over your head. Which is why foreigners frequently comment on the easygoing attitude and carelessness they see in people.

New apartments are being built because it's more and more profitable to do so. It's more profitable, because the property prices are increasing. The property prices are increasing because rent is increasing. It takes tremendous mental gymnastics not to realise it.

The way to lower the rent is to make renting less profitable (eg. by taxing it higher), limit any homeowner support (eg. tax breaks on mortgage) only to the first residential property and control the mortgage amount that can be provided by banks.

Ideally someone who's buying property to live in should be paying 20%+ less than someone who's buying it to rent.

I don't live in the UK, so I'm not too familiar with the specifics there, but what seems to be happening worldwide is that young people are flocking to cities. I'm fairly young myself and I don't know anyone my age who would like to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere - everyone I know was either born in a larger city or moved to one.

In the past, if you were born in a small town, maybe there was a factory nearby and you'd end up working there. Only a few would move out.

These days the factory has most likely closed, and the jobs were shipped off to China. Even if, by some miracle, it happened to still be open, most young people wouldn't want to work there anyway. Young people tend to be more educated and want jobs where they can make use of their education. These jobs tend to be located in big cities.

There are only two ways out of this mess:

The first one is to satisfy the demand -- that means building more, a lot more. No Western country is currently building enough. The demand is so huge that the only way to satisfy it would be very high-density housing. I'm talking 30+ stories apartment buildings everywhere like you see in East Asia. This would have to be accompanied by enough public transport because at that population density, you'd need super wide highways everywhere to support people driving cars. I don't think allowing such construction is politically feasible, however, as it would completely change the character of existing cities.

The other one is to embrace remote work and revitalize small towns. Remote work is not enough since people still demand the amenities cities provide. These are lacking precisely because so many young people have left, causing a negative feedback loop. We need trendy cafes and restaurants, we need WeWork locations, and for young families, we need high-quality school/preschool/daycare. If small towns "gentrify" with such amenities causing young remote-workers to start moving there, this may significantly ease the demand pressure on city housing.

The best solution is probably a combination of the above two.

If you make something less profitable, less of it will be provided.

Who do you think funds the building and maintenance of property?

A decent apartment here costs the equivalent of 20 times the average income. you need to have roughly 25% of the cost for a mortgage to be granted, according to local regulation, which would be 5 times your yearly salary. Try to save that considering that just renting (while you save) will easily take 50-60% of your income.

Even those who can do it will only achieve it after more than a decade of paying through the nose.

And there will be places where that will not be true

Not everyone can buy property because not everyone is sitting on unallocated capital.

i imagine one day when you have " unallocated capital. " this will be a distant embarassing memory for you

IMO I'd make renting restricted to government monopoly (like alcohol sales in Sweden, and the old first-hand contracts system), and property ownership restricted to your residence only, and then build much, much more whilst stopping mass immigration (it's crazy to invite 2+ million refugees when there isn't enough housing already!).

But note that waiting time only applies to first-hand contracts. You can still rent second-hand.

The idea would be to build much more, and buy up the former second-hand places.

I moved from San Diego to Amsterdam and was very happy to find 3-4 bedroom apartments to buy (the bank accepted my self employment income and gave a 1.6% interest rate). Apartments are well designed so you don’t need as much space.

I live half a block from a grocery store and still get a lot of groceries delivered. We have 3 kids and no cars. Cheap and easy to rent if we want one for the day. I love this life style where the kids can walk and bike everywhere themself.

Son: “Dad, I have to go to guitar, but it is raining”

Dad: “Here are your rain pants. Hurry, but be careful biking in the rain”

Europe is designed for the landed aristocracy, not working people.

And bitcoin was a fraction of a dollar just 10 years ago. Unfortunately, we don't have a time machine and the housing prices of today have far outpaced the earning increases that the working class saw in that time.

15-20 years ago, housing was seen mostly as a place you'd buy to live yourself, not an investment vehicle you'd buy to get grand returns from. That's the difference.

Local European IT firms (your local broadband provider, or a supermarket chain) normally pay much less though.

IIRC the housing market in the Netherlands 4 years ago was way more accessible than the madness of today so that's probably not a surprise that he could afford it. Ask him if he could have bought in the market of today please.

Smaller 2 bedrooms can be bought in the center of Amsterdam for €350,000 with a €35,000 deposit (10%).

How is that not viable for a tech worker?

To get one of those 600k apartments you'd have to flip your first apartment for the bigger downpayment, and that's gonna take another 2 years.

That’s 2 years saving to then live where you want and then an extra 2 years to live where you want in the apartment that you want which is oversized for a single person.

Why do you need a 3 bed as a single person and what’s your ideal scenario? Do you want to be able to afford a house without a deposit, is that it?

That 2 bedroom apartment is in one of the most desirable areas of the most desirable city in the country. Location matters.

Here are the family places in Amsterdam for less than 900k. According to ABNAMRO, that’s affordable (with mortgage), if you have two incomes that gross 150k. https://www.funda.nl/koop/gemeente-amsterdam/

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

I was paid 75k as an L5 engineer at Amazon, that's like intermediate senior (two levels down from Staff). So maybe one level up you'd get 100-110k?

I've never seen salaries anywhere close to that article. Even contractors might pay $150k (and then you have to pay your own taxes, insurance, etc. out of that).

But - compared to what I have heard about the US, the variance between offers is much more extreme in the EU, depending on whether these companies only compete in the local market or globally, and it is really hard to figure this out before going through the whole process. I have been surprised by a few companies that pay very competitive salaries in the US but which are barely competitive compared to some of the salaries I know from local companies here in the EU.

So yeah, it is possible to find these salaries in the EU, but they will still be considerably lower than what you can expect in the US and the bad offers are harder to weed out in the EU.

You know, with this statement you've just proved his point, that good tech wages in Europe are super scarce when you need to be very picky with wich FAANG you join for good compensation. That's basically skimming the cream off the cream you just skimmed. How much are you left with now, ~1% of the total tech jobs?

> How much are you left with now, ~1% of the total tech jobs?

If you want top 1% pay, you gonna have to hunt for top 1% jobs, seems obvious, no?

Of course, but the discussion was about the fact that the tech job market in Europe is poor. You pointing out that the top 1% devs in Europe make really good money doesn't change that since the 99% are left with sub-paar options.

To make it clearer, a better indication would be to look at median opportunities and wages in the tech sectors, and here the wages in the EU are far lower than in the US even when adjusted for the local purchasing power and real estate prices (actually, I think this makes it even worse for Europe, as stuff cost more and real estate is more expensive).

If you remove the 1%ers like FAANGS and other US unicorns pumped with VC money form the EU tech scene, you're not left with much good local grown opportunities, the wages take a massive nose-dive, which is what the majority is earning.

Add a partner’s salary to the equation and you are walking your kids to school and living the dream.

That doesn't seem likely. I live in Dublin, and the median household income for a first time buyer is approximately 90k in euros.

I'm surprised that this is possible in London.

On £55k you can afford to borrow £247.5k.

£247.5k + 10% deposit and you are looking at £272k properties.

Check sold house prices in London and you’ll find plenty under £272k.

Possible in London which is one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Honestly though, apartments anywhere near the city in Dublin are still way out of reach for a person on your wage, even if the rules changed to 4.5.

No idea what locals earn there, but from a outside perspective it appeared really affordable if you ignore the high taxes :3

Then it is true that too little housing is built, and with the current very low interest rates people can afford to pay a lot for their dwellings. But I don't think it is intentional to not build more.

But it would of course be much better if they had spent all that money they used for car tunnels on public transport and more bicycle lanes and highways.

Stockholm is small enough that it’s walkable with fast public transport connecting everything.

I don’t think it ever took me over 30 minutes to get anywhere, none of my friends drive in town but over half of them own a car so we are often traveling north for skiing, south for the summer, weekends in someone’s parent’s farm, but I have no recent memory of driving around town, there’s just no need, plus, no drinking, so it’s a nonstarter.

Isn't that still really cheap compared to NY or Silicon Valley? Rising housing prices has more to do with pressure to move to a select few cities rather than walkability or rising population. E.g. in Germany housing in Munich, Hamburg or Frankfurt costs multiples of housing in smaller eastern German cities.

SF: ~$167k USD p.a. - https://www.builtinsf.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-eng...

Stockholm: 45k SEK per month = ~$63k USD p.a. - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-software-engine...

Taxes are also much higher (especially if your employer has good health insurance coverage in the US, so the added benefits are less). Like I pay an average 40% rate on income plus 25% sales tax, the marginal rate on income (and RSUs, etc.) is 56%!

It's really painful for stuff like housing which is a similar price (and increasing!), or inelastic international goods like electronics, cars, fuel (which is also heavily taxed), etc.

Americans are incredibly lucky - far higher wages, and the freedom to manage your own finances (not forced to pay for irresponsible parents' lifestyle choices through extremely high taxes).

USA is a huge nation with extreme variations in housing costs and salaries depending on location. Most workers get few benefits, no vacation time, and meager government benefits. Homeless people wander most areas especially urban due to these issues. Still think Americans are lucky?

A salary of 50k SEK costs the employer 65.7k SEK on their books, which is what actually matters. The actual marginal taxrate flowing from your employers books at that level is somewhere up at 75%-80%, not even counting sales tax when you use the money.

Taxes are too high (on income), and wages are too low.

Effective marginal tax rates in the US are higher than they look at a glance.

Maybe there's just a ton of people and not a lot of restaurants and people like to eat out occasionally.

The immediate conclusion doesn't have to be that the Italians have a bunch of money that they are being frivolous with. There are other options.

Not saying you're wrong.

I've just read that Europeans make objectively WAYYYY less than American's in tech jobs to a staggering depressing amount for the same amount of work...

So just rustles my jimmies to see unscientific hearsay rumours about them to make their situation worse.

Of course, were the other patrons tourists?

They are.

Pizza Margarita in Naples cost 4 Euro when I was there in 2019.

Those taxes pay for other forms of freedom

I don't support inviting 3 million refugees (to a nation of only 11 million people at the time) when we have no spare housing, or being forced to fund others' childcare (it's a lifestyle choice).

Taxes can be much better managed.

Is it really obligatory? I know that it is often correlated, but it is possible to build apartment tower with decently sized apartments, in a walkable neighbourhood.

Maybe it tends to be more profitable to split apartments into smaller one? While splitting house plots into smaller being less profitable and resulting in this effect?

Walkable neighborhoods need destinations you can walk to. Businesses need a minimum number of customers to be viable, so the denser the neighborhood the more variety of destinations it will have.

To avoid cars taking up the space, it's necessary to have high-frequency public transport, and that also requires high population density to be viable.

Nothing small about these houses in the walkable neighbourhood of Roncesvalles:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

You still have a (back)yard and can have a garage attached to a laneway. Just up the street there are more modestly sized houses (3 bedrooms usually):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

Video on the concept by the Not Just Bikes channel, "Suburbs that don't Suck - Streetcar Suburbs (Riverdale, Toronto)":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

* Walkability, large houses = very expensive neighborhoods and gentrification

* Large houses, affordable = rural areas where cars are required

* Affordable, walkable neighborhood = Tiny apartments/homes in an urban area

* A bit of the best/worst of all 3 = Suburbs

Up until ~2000 it was not so, because living in the city was for immigrants and all the WASPs moved into the innter/outer suburbs with their white picket fences. The area of the links is where the Poles concentrated; to the west were the Ukrainians; to the east is Little Portugal (then onto Chinatown); to the north-east is Little Italy. Toronto is a good example of what Jane Jacobs saying 'you don't live in a city, but in a neighbourhood':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighbourhoods_in_Toro...

And the reason why Toronto (SW Ontario) is so expensive, especially since 2015, is because we've had so much immigration in the region, but housing hasn't kept up by pure volume (regardless of density or other factors).

But I was thinking about walkability from European perspective where it means you don't need to own a car (the places you've liked to look like every household has a car). When I lived in London on multiple occasions I've had jobs within 20 minute walk from where I lived.

I know people who are in the area that do not have a car, but the area has been gentrified over the last few years, so folks have cars 'just because why not' really.

Still generally applies per the label of streetcar suburbs. The area in question is just south of a subway line, and Roncesvalles has a streetcar line going through it to a station.

'Not become' but 'has been' for decades. You only now start to notice it as inflation and wages have not kept up.

This is by design in most post-WW 2 western economies as an economic policy to "increase national wealth". That's why housing loans are subsidized and whatnot.

Especially since many cities were almost completely destroyed. Even where my grandparents lived in England, the Blitz destroyed a lot of homes and meant mass construction was inevitable.

It's really been since the 80s, that all infrastructure and construction projects have been slowed down and hampered by NIMBYism - and it's all about just pumping up the existing prices through artificial scarcity.

With falling fertility rates, natural population growth in the west is about zero today. If not even (going to be) negative.

Here in Sweden the population has increased by almost 30% in the last 15 years.

Similar story in the UK (but a smaller proportion by %, as the base population is higher).

In western europe, rural areas and small towns, although boring AF, usually have some trade schools or small collages and local industries of their own that still keep locals there and sometimes attract foreigners so not everyone has to scram to the big cities, although big cities there have major housing issues too.

I think that the reason is similar to why stocks have appreciated so much - long-term interest rates have dropped as a result of QE.

What central banks usually do is that they buy short-term bonds to affect short-term rates. QE means that they buy long-term bonds to affect long-term rates.

You might have your correlation/causation things mixed up. Walkability means higher quality of life, which means higher demand thus higher prices. In turn, as real estate prices go up, real estate developers are pressured to provide more houses from a limited construction area, thus this means shrinking apartment sizes.

Offering smaller apartments also has the advantage of increasing price per unit of area, while keeping selling prices within reach of the market segment you're targeting, i.e., you might not afford 1M for a house with 200m² but you might afford 500m for a house with 100m².

You can have sizeable homes even in walkable neighbourhoods. Look at any suburb constructed pre-WW2:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

You still have a (back)yard and can have a garage attached to a laneway. Just up the street there are more modestly sized houses (3 bedrooms usually):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

Firstly, walkability only means higher prices if supply is limited. If it's the default, then supply matches demand.

Secondly, a grocery store needs say 500 potential customers (households) within walking/transit distance. A cafe 2,000. A specialist shop 5,000. Otherwise they need parking for customers arriving by car, which takes up yet more space, making the area less walkable, inducing more car demand and car lanes, etc. The same calculation applies to schools, parks and other amenities.

It isn't possible to reach those customer numbers while giving each family American suburbia levels of space.

Isn't it, though?

In fact, not only is it limited, it's also a market on the supply side.

> Secondly, a grocery store needs say 500 potential customers (households) within walking/transit distance.

In consolidated urban areas with medium density occupation, such as city centers in pretty much any relatively large European city, you already have multiple supermarkets at a stone's throw. In some places like Madrid some suburban areas even have multiple supermarkets on the same apartment block.

But the other is just different approach to planning. I live in a relatively new, so-called "vinex" suburb [1], a neighbourhood built according to certain specifications - relatively small gardens, bike- and pedestrian safe, the only cars you see are the ones heading to- and from their house, the rest is redirected to a ring road. And, very low uniformity in housing designs; common themes, but a lot of diversity.

That said, at the moment we have a massive housing crisis - we need 100K houses in the next decade, probably more - and I feel like the only way to solve it is to build boring houses, big apartment complexes, that kinda thing. The alternative is population reduction, but nobody wants that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location

Agree. This is key. To be sure, Europeans are busy making plenty of wasteful American-style car-based future ghost towns around the edges and satellites of their beautiful (or at least walkable) dense old urban cores. Places tourists don't usually see, what I recall travel writer Rick Steves referred to as "Dullsdorf or Nothington".

That's a lot for a country with 17M inhabitants. Is that mostly driven by urban flight (not enough flats where people want to be) or is it more about population increase or less people living together (no enough flats anywhere)?

There are probably other factors in play here rather than simple availability. Perhaps we should stop treating housing as an investiment?

Edit: not sure if I misunderstood your comment to mean that 100k more houses should be built in the US or elsewhere. My point still stands I believe.

- [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ESALEUSQ176N

European towns and cities are mixed.

https://citymonitor.ai/transport/parking/what-bombs-did-rott...

Just acres and acres and acres of asphalt hellscape where there was once life.

I've lived in the center of an older US city, and one thing I loved was how easy grocery shopping was. I went to the market almost daily, so I never needed a vehicle to get 10 bags of groceries home. Friends who lived outside the city always asked if it felt limiting to not have a car, but I actually found it very freeing. I walked or took transit, and while the transit wasn't usually time-competitive with driving, it was basically free time for me to read, think, etc.

How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.

We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout.

So I think a car is reasonable.

Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car.

For comparison, I have small supermarket 250m away (on the ground floor of an apartment block) - and I do not need to cross road to get there. And withing 250m there are several other shops like bakeries, pharmacies, haidresser, convenience shops, clothes shop, fast foods...

It also very much depends on the geography of the area, some cities simply sit on steep hill slopes and bikes are just not an option unless you're young and super-athletic. Most of "bike-cities" are in completely flat areas and it's not a coincidence.

The other big factor that people miss in these comparisons are schools. Generally speaking housing in dense places with good schools is usually very expensive. People that can't afford that typically have the choice between crappy urban schools or good suburban schools. Most of them choose the good schools.

I think you have a very wrong picture of what the GP is talking about, since this is not really the case at all. We're not talking about NY-style bodegas here. In Germany for example, cut-throat discount stores like Aldi that constantly try to lower the price floor for groceries are ubiquitous and can definitely be found in dense neighborhoods. Come to think of it, a while ago I read that they started building apartment buildings with a store integrated in the ground floor because that concept works well for them.

Twice the distance, 20m away there is another overpriced convenience shop but with a better quality.

I shop in supermarket about 250m away on ground floor of another apartment block that has quite good prices, good enough that it is not worth time and other costs to shop further away for many products.

That sounds like USA specific problem, in Poland, Kraków all good high schools were in city center. Most of students were using bus/tram.

> I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store. Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings.

Not really applicable in Poland, prices in Biedronka supermarket (closest to me is on ground level of apartment tower) are basically the same as in Auchan (big supermarket on suburbs).

> Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings.

Last time I checked any savings would be eaten by extra cost and time of going over 2km to the shop.

1. Uber isn't big in Ireland, so not so reliable

2. Taxi or Uber won't wait for me to shop

3. Taxi or Uber won't have appropriate child seats for my kids

4. My car cost 1,400 euros and is useful in other situations.

But honestly I dislike cars alot - it just makes sense at present.

Unintentional design, or rather emergent structure (as extolled by Jane Jacobs who was/is a guiding light for urbanists), is also a reason. So things like not destroying neighborhoods for multi-lane expressways, and not doing exclusive residential zoning, thereby allowing small scale non-industrial businesses to be interspersed with housing.

Europe is not just Berlin, Helsinki and Paris.

There are a lot of very rural areas where you need a car to get things done.

Nice reference to Brave New World, I suppose?

London Canary Wharf being the epitome, where no one wants to live so badly the people that work there will pay more to live further away and suffer the horrible commute to go live in a walkable, older area.

Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to.

Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient.

Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.

It's just not inconvenient at all. I wonder if the difference in opinion is from a lack of exercise? I don't mind carrying 20kg of stuff back home in bags, I'm used to it and it's good to get at least some exercise.

This is funny and I think very cultural. I'm American and would walk 20 minutes to a large super market and carry 20kg back, up and down hills in San Francisco no less. I too enjoyed the exercise. I knew plenty of people who would shop at smaller stores, mostly people who grew up in cities, but I never really liked it. I grew up going to large super markets and find grocery shopping at them cathartic.

Our neighborhood supermarkets are the size of, say, a basketball court, so they're not as tiring.

Not that there's anything wrong with tap water, but eeeh.

Note that you can put it into backpack or use something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... (sorry, not sure how it is called in English).

PS Unless they have serious medical issues, far worse than typical. Or they are really old or really young. But in such cases they likely should not drive anyway.

What are you, a granny? It is not strenuous or difficult at all.

It's no wonder the US has such a high obesity and diabetes rate, with a sedentary society like that.

With something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... it is even simpler - my 80 years old grandmother is using it for shopping.

> your only sport ever is carrying groceries. What a poor life

Just how much stuff you buy? Maybe you live in awful city with shops more than 500m away from your home?

I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.)

Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community.

More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game.

I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.

Political reasons? You bet! Everything we do is political. We are /zoon politicon/. I do things the way I do them because I like it this way, and if by doing them this way I contribute to the mainstream leaning one lifestyle closer towards what I consider comfortable then: yes, this is all terribly political.

> That is our failure, and it's a failure brought about to a large extent by bad policy that tells us we can't have nice things, because nice things are for the rich

You do realize that this is just your privilege? Most of people don't have everything in the walking reach, some would have to bike up a hill for a few kilometers to get to a shop, etc?

Don't get me wrong, it's great that you can, but it's just a lucky consequence of where you live, not something that's universally applicable to everyone.

This is exactly what TFA is about. It should not be a privilege, but it is, because we made it scarce. Not because it is more expensive to create, it is not.

Yes, that's the point, though. This discussion thread is about walkable cities.

I should also point out that urban planning that gives priority to people who walk benefits everyone, independent of their income. This cannot be said for designs that give priority to cars.

Anyway, my point being that IMHO it's not always a good idea to just try to copy/paste architectural and urbanistic solutions between regions with very different geography, culture and population density, no matter how trendy the idea is.

Or even less if shop is 300m away.

From my personal experience, I've found that doing physical exercise (paradoxically enough) seems to give me more energy. On those days where I've sat still all day I'm much more likely to feel like doing nothing after work, whereas when I've done my usual cycle commute I'm usually a lot more mentally alert. YMMV of course, but given the choice I'll personally rather do more than less physical exercise, even if it's small activities here and there like lugging some groceries.

I have a high street lined with shops on my way home where I can stop by, have a quick chat, perhaps pick up something that caught my attention as the scent of freshness overwhelmed my senses when I walked into the shop owned by a person that invites me for a drink and has visited my house socially.

The newest place near me right now was opened by an investment banker that chose to optimise for his hairline in his own words, so when I stop there to get stock up on exotic groceries, that is the best solution for me and if it’s raining, so what? I’ve got towels at home.

A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.

In the UK at least, there are at least 5 competitive services offering that in every city, including most major supermarket chains, so there is no need to shlep, ever. I only go to the supermarket for fresh bread/milk occasionally in between deliveries.

You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!

Perhaps this is a cultural difference: I don't value efficiency in my life nearly as much as you seem to do. I don't go out of my way to waste time, but I'm perfectly happy to walk through the quiet roads while carrying groceries, thinking about what I've recently read, wondering about things I happen to see on my walk ---such as the Jugendstil reliefs on facades, a very inefficient type of decoration---, trying to identify trees and shrubs, etc.

I also really don't mind taking the time to write this comment, even though there's nothing efficient about communicating like this.

My work and art likewise are not efficient --- elegant perhaps, pretty even; but no artifact I leave behind is primarily efficient (unless it's code that was meant to be efficient only, the worst kind of code).

I used so many words to inefficiently say: I feel that efficiency is rather overrated. I won't ever give up being slow and being at ease with living slowly --- with plenty of opportunity for life to happen by accident.

PS: most of the public transportation stops are 10 mins away from where I live. Even the train. It's 10 mins away by bus ;)

I used to do that when I interned in Germany. The market was near the bus stop and our dorm had limited fridge space, so I’d tend to buy and eat the same day (and rarely cook from scratch). That wouldn’t work so well to feed a family of four that way.

I think part of the disconnect here, though, is that you're associating this process with extra mental overhead, but when there's no extra effort needed to just get stuff you don't need to think about it as much. Forget to get butter? Oh well, you can literally just get it the next day on your way back from the park or the movie theater—or if you really need it right now, you can get it at corner store just a few blocks away at a slightly higher price.

We don't really make lists.

Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores.

> You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different

First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.

The actual minority case is that I'm picking up something in bulk (replacing pantry stock, getting supplies for a party, etc), in which case I might switch to using my car, depending on how heavy or unwieldy it is for a half-mile walk.

Like, come on. No typical two-person household is going through a full package of toilet paper and an entire mid-sized bottle of laundry detergent every three days.

"Somehow" being "carrying a 10 pound bag of rice home over my shoulder when I eventually run out". There's no special mystery to it.

Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country!

Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared.

Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought.

https://nigreenways.com/

Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.

Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc).

To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away.

> and queueing in crowded grocery stores

Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.

So my walkable city is more time efficient and has health benefits for using your own body instead of a machine to do the traveling. It's better if we measure for time efficiency and health. And it shows. Looking around, 95% of the people here, at least those not in cars, are healthy, slim and fit. All as it should be. What else would you optimize for?

For example, this morning I drove a kid to school because we were running behind and it was a ~10m round trip. Usually we bike and it's a ~20m round trip. I saved 10m of clock time but lost ~20m of exercise. Now I can choose whether to make up that exercise later and end up net ~10m poorer or skip today's exercise and end up slightly fatter and lazier.

(I agree about grocery shopping though.)

Also I am talking about me, I guess most people still do their daily grocery runs.

However I buy 90% of our food online. 9% in nearby farmer shops. The relatively high population density makes next day delivery a normal thing even in the most remote places. There is literally no reason to waste time for grocery shopping these days.

Same for walking to a smaller shop if I am not feeling like biking that day (so most likely taking metro to work that day). Though the chances of finding a place to park that is closer to that shop than my home is almost 0.

The layout out cities to accommodate lots of cars and easy parking is a huge cause of inefficiency often.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I would go as far as to say most people don’t accurately imagine how it would be, when they haven’t lived somewhere like Amsterdam.

You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith.

Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week.

In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres).

Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?

I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!

If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort.

> And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless.

One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.

Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all.

If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.

Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.

That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.

As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.

And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.

People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.

It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.

This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.

I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably

Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car

Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places

This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).

Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic.

Unless you live on South Pole or something.

Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station.

>Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?