Re:We can do better than “same, but electric”
by maldusiecle on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @12:48PM
(#30845057)
Living in a city isn't going to be much fun if it's a crappy city, sure. You can say it's not a dump area, but I'm sorry, a city with zero museums and only two coffee shops is just not much of a place. I've lived in small college towns that did better than that.
Re:We can do better than “same, but electric”
by heyitsanewacco on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @01:48PM
(#30846010)
Vancouver is a great city. I didn't live anywhere near the nice parts. I was walking distance to the 7-11 and laundromat. And the apartment was infested with cockroaches.
The bank is the best landlord I ever had.
I think that a lot of $$$$$$ IT workers forget about slumlords (or are slumlords themselves!)
Re:We can do better than “same, but electric”
by maldusiecle on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @05:17PM
(#30848481)
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Vancouver. But in my experience, bad and even extortionate landlords are not limited to cities--they absolutely do exist in suburban and even rural areas.
I lived in an apartment for several years and only moved into a house within the past couple.
The single-bedroom apartment we were in had a handful of fast food places and maybe a couple dozen other restaurants within a 20 mile radius (i.e. far from being able to bike there -- not that we had anywhere to store bicycles, anyway).
We had 0 museums, maybe 2 coffee shops (half of which were Starbucks), one library (which we also have by the house), same number of parks, and only a few entertainment options. Most of which were either a movie theater or shopping, which doesn't really help fight the mass consumerism problem.
This was not in some dump area, either. In fact, that area was growing rapidly. Mostly by building more concrete bunker apartments. I can't even count the number of trees that were cut down to support this with 0 replanting (not even for decoration).
Yeah, really sounds like it's saving the planet.
So I get it: well-planned urban apartments and higher density areas can be more ecologically sustainable, but it's more nuanced than that. Apartments aren't just magically/categorically better. A lot of apartment developers aren't really considering environmental impact when building.
EDIT: oh and our internet is about double the speed of what it was in the apartment, even though the apartment complex was in an area with Google Fiber. It just wasn't available to us.