I think most Americans would like to have the conveniences of a walkable area and the space/affordability advantages of a suburb. Some parts of the world accomplish this by building many walkable towns and neighborhoods that people can live in. For some reason in much of the US we give people a binary choice of living in a small number of extremely expensive, dense cities -- or living in sidewalkless suburban strip-mall hell with a massive commute. I don't think any of this precisely "what people want", really: most folks are just given a very small menu to choose from.

> I think most Americans would like to have the conveniences of a walkable area and the space/affordability advantages of a suburb

I don't know about that. It seems to me that most Americans will sit and wait in their idling car for several minutes so they can get a parking spot that is 100 feet closer to the store's entrance.

I personally park my car immediately when I get in a lot and start walking, which makes it very noticeable how many people would rather hunt for a spot slightly closer. Also, in larger shopping centers my observation is that most people will move their car between each shop to minimize walking.

Agreed. And we used to build those in-between places in the US; most of the remaining walkable small towns in the US were built a long time ago. (I’m about to move to one because yeah that’s what I’m looking for; glad I live on the east coast where there are still a few options.) But we’ve largely outlawed building any new ones.

Walkable towns abound in the US. They’re all what most would consider “rural” but a town that’s not even two miles wide can’t help but be walkable.

But people don’t want them, they prefer the suburbs or the city - the suburbs often because it’s near the jobs in the city and yet still has some of the spacing they want.

One solution is to stop building suburbs as they were in the 50s and build them as many small towns even if butted up against each other. Even the worst suburbs have shopping areas, etc, that could be spread out and made accessible.

I too would like the car lifestyle ... from 1950.

Sadly, we have created a monster. I suspect many Americans now don't even know what a community without cars would look like, that it could even work at all.

I know a lot of Americans who are well-travelled and have seen world-class transit in Europe and Asia, and most of them still choose to live in suburbs.

The average American wants to live in a detached house that they own. This does not lead to dense cities. It leads to sprawl, which is what we got because it’s what we want.

I fall into this boat. I lived abroad for many years, did the digital nomad thing, have been really all over the world. I love walkability and have looked for it here in the US as a driving basis for housing selection. All that said, I absolutely will not share walls with someone else. I used to work nights, and sleep in the day, and I'm still a night owl. It is untenable to me to have to deal with complaints because I am watching Netflix at 9:30PM, or to have to have any shared systems which I am now limited away from being able to fix myself.

On the flipside, I don't want a huge place to live, so I am actively trying to find (or build) a small (less than 1800sqft) narrow (3 stories, like a detached townhouse) house that is extremely ecological (passive house standards) in a walkable area. When I considered permanently moving to Europe, places like this were actually not horribly uncommon, although they weren't as common as apartment blocks. In the US, places like this are near impossible to find because most houses are built by "production builders" who optimize for the largest square footage possible on a lot space allowed by local code to increase selling price, and do it as the lowest cost (meets code, maybe, basically same as getting a C grade).

You're right - I do not want to live in dense cities. I did it for years, and hated it. I was happy when I was able to move out into a detached home where I can use speakers and not have to worry about a neighbor getting angry.

It's only one neighbor out of the 6 I would share separating walls with, but one is all it takes.

If you could live in a detached home but the next block over had a restaurant or two and a small grocery, wouldn't that be pleasant?

Zoning that allows ONLY single-family detached housing, and no retail or business, forces car-dependency.

"Detached home or high-rise apartment in a city" is a false dichotomy.

> wouldn't that be pleasant

Not really. Small grocery stores lack variety (by necessity, when their potential market is limited to families living in a 1-2 mile radius). Two restaurants lack variety. It makes for stupidly boring food choices over time.

Frankly, I'd end up not using them, ordering even more over the internet, and interacting even less with folks nearby.

As living in such place.. It's still „oh let's drive to bigger shop or THAT butcher this time“. Or „other“ restaurant.

And people living downtown still do the same - driving to same big malls in outskirts, restaurants in other towns etc. The funniest case is when people live downtown and drive to non-downtown workplaces :)

> Zoning that allows ONLY single-family detached housing, and no retail or business, forces car-dependency.

A lot of suburbs are not like that. I've lived in the Bay Area suburbs for most of my life and I don't think I've ever lived more than half a mile from a shopping center with a grocery store and restaurants. Every main road has them. Between the main roads, there are houses.

I spent time in Singapore where living in dense high rises and traveling on a very well run public transit system is commonplace.

Same thing. I found that people who could afford cars bought them for the convenience (despite the 100% import duty and $100,000 COE charge for 10 year permit).

And same with detached housing. It’s was pretty much the ideal for families. Constant complaints of noise in apartment buildings, crappy neighbors, limited space.

Don’t get me wrong, many people like the apartment living car-free. Mostly, young, childless people. But when kids came into the picture or even wealth increased and people got older, preferences changed.

The problem is the vast middle ground between those two extremes that just doesn't exist in America. In Europe they seem to be more commonly called some variation of "villages". Single family homes with small lots, with larger community greenspace, and a small central hub with some shopping for necessities and a reliable connection to a larger public transit system.

Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient". That slight lowering of density prevents easy walkable access to any sort of central community hub, which makes it financially unviable to have a small community shopping district. That makes a shared public transit access point difficult to implement, since there's no community hub. Everything else spirals from there, making cars (and particularly bigger cars - remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away) the only way for a family to function.

I don't want to live in Hong Kong density, but I absolutely don't want to live in the typical American suburbia.

>Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient".

> remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away)

People don't live in the suburbs to start a mini-farm. If you have to drive 20-30 minutes just for necessities you live in a rural area, not suburbs.

Kids are noisy and have plenty of energy. You don’t want to be staying below me in an apartment building. The noise of my 2 kids jumping and running around would drive you nuts. And oh - they will have friends over as well. And if they’re doing band or music practice - oh boy :)

Yeah - they could go out. But they’ll come back in and its messy and noisy everywhere.

It’s just the way kids are. I guess folks need to be careful what they wish for. I’m all for accessible and densely populated housing. But I’m used to the noise.

I'd have no problem with having you as my neighbor. Living in a German brick apartment building, when my neighbor has his subwoofer on maximum, I can still barely hear it over the sound of my own breath.

I can watch movies at cinema reference volume at home at 3am and my neighbors don't notice it either.

Your problem isn't with apartment buildings, it's with shoddy american construction standards.

Nahhh... even the best apartment buildings suck compared to a detached home.

I've lived in all concrete apartment buildings and you can still here some noise as it travels through solid concrete pretty well.

Our choices are limited by options available to us.

Yup. And the options available to us have been limited by decades of zoning policy encouraging single-family homes only.

My girlfriend and I are about to move to the suburbs to be closer to her family, but it’s to an inner-ring suburb with excellent transit back into the city. There are maybe two towns for this in the area that aren’t outrageously priced, and even those two are above average.

See also, “The myth of revealed preference for suburbs”: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...

The average American likely doesn't want a life without cars. That seems to be an HN obsession seemingly (my perception) fueled by people who have lived and stayed in very dense urban areas.

Creating larger spaces that aren't made for cars is great, but people will still need long-range individual transportation.

I think it's because the young people online are much more drawn to the active, exciting urban lifestyle than the average American. The average American would much rather have the safety, quiet, and just space that comes with suburban living. People want yards to play with their kids, and that sort of spread-out living just necessitates cars. Housing prices aren't high because of cars. Housing prices are high because people want their own personal space.

Nobody's going to build a rail system with a thousand subway stations connecting every neighborhood in a US metro area. That would cost like a trillion dollars, plus maintenance. It's just not feasible to cater good public transport to people living that spread out. And no one wants to walk miles to a less-dense rail system or take some slow bus route.

And outside of major cities, I've never heard of someone complain about cars. Most people are perfectly happy with cars. Sure they might think trains are cool, but they wouldn't want to move inward for it or pay whatever cost would be necessary for trains to come outward.

While all that might be true, it is also true that hardly anyone would be willing to cover the true cost of living in rural areas far away from things. In pretty much every country I'm aware of the urban population is strongly subsidising the rural. And that is only covering first order cost (just look at the massive subsidies to get broadband to rural communities), if we would put prizes on second order cost like pollution, CO2... rural living would become unpopular very quickly (the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around).

> the reality already is that there is a massive move into the cities not the other way around

That's not what the data says, at least in the US. We consistently see a net change of about 2 million people per year moving out of cities and into the surrounding suburbs: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/16/in-2020-few...

And the desire to live in cities is shrinking as well, now at under 20%: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...

That is arguably because US cities suck. They don't have good public transportation, the kind that even well to do people choose to ride regularly like they do in say Tokyo, London, Switerland, Netherlands, etc.. They also don't have good bicycle infrustructure. And they have lots of crime or crime of the types and amounts that get people to want to live in the safer suburbs. Even the cities in the US are usually designed around cars, not people

Could you be specific about how the urban population is subsidizing the rural? Also, where does most of your food come from?

What do you mean in regards to CO2? I'd suggest that many people living a rural lifestyle completely offset their CO2 footprint due to carbon sequestration. I know I have enough trees and vegetation on my acreage to completely offset my carbon emissions. But, of course, to counter your argument I really only need to offset the extra emissions that come with driving an extra n miles into the city.

It's not an offset if it would have been that way anyway - In other words, you owning/living in a rural area does nothing extra to offset carbon emissions, because that rural area would have offset it regardless.

The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered.

Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense.

I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.

You posted this comment once, it was flagged by users, and you deleted it. If your intention was to post a new version that didn't break the site guidelines, I think that's probably ok (albeit borderline). But in that case you should have removed this too:

> Love the "gosh if you want to eat we need to fund lifestyle ruralism with billions of dollars of infrastructure annually" whataboutism, like that's supposed to be some kind of a gotcha

That's obviously against the site guidelines. Please make your substantive points without doing that in the future.

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

Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.

> There's a lot of miles of power lines and roads for what is, in the end, maybe 10k people in that county outside the cities/towns.

Power plants are (mostly) created in rural areas, so your argument is a bit backwards: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in...

Your story that the last miles are costing us an arm and leg don't really hold up to comprehensive analysis: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec....

The tldr of this is that the higher number of connections to the energy grid, the higher the cost of the grid. It doesn't really matter how you distribute them.

> But we don't need to be encouraging "lifestyle ruralism". That's extremely infrastructure-heavy and it's absolutely true that people living in, say, Mikado MI (pop 899) or along one of the state highways out there are using disproportionate amount of infrastructure funding relative to the number of actual people there.

I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. My water was drawn from a well into a community water storage tank that was then pumped to the local community. This was repeated all through that area. Water, in this case, was a co-op as well as energy. Sewage was done on-site; I had an aerobic septic system. For all intents and purposes, with respect to the angle of your argument, the footprint of my town was miniscule compared to a city.

More anecdotally, when I worked for a water startup we had a way easier time getting into rural areas because many of them had never had public water infrastructure.

> classless

Uncivil, violates site rules. You can express yourself without putdowns.

> I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some.

Eh, rather dismissive yourself.

> I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about.

How many miles of roads and power lines in your rural area, divided across how many people?

Again, I very clearly expressed what I meant by "infrastructure heavy", but with you self-admittedly not really being a full and fair participant in the discussion, I can see why you might have some confusion.

> Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly.

The saying goes that people use the "downvote" like a "disagree" button and when it comes to political debates people use the "flag" button like an "I really really disagree" button. If I don't see a particular reason a post is flagged then yeah, I don't really have a problem with recreating it.

I shouldn't be suppressed by average users for expressing a well-reasoned argument they disagree with, nor censured for a single disagreeable line. Even you yourself cannot avoid technical violations of the site rules, your comment itself is violating the same rules to the same extent as mine.

Realistically, that rule is a "please", as I've been repeatedly told when I point out violations of it, and virtually every comment has something that someone can be offended about. I'm not going out and attacking people here, it's just a "jaywalking" violation that everyone does and people fall back on when they're losing an argument. The strictest interpretation of the rule essentially forbids any sort of "active-voice" argument that's strong enough to make a positive point (because someone can ALWAYS find be offended by any positive point) and that's incredibly harmful to discourse.

If you have a problem, call it out specifically, or get dang, otherwise if people don't bother replying and are just using flags as a way to suppress opinions they disagree with then yeah, I don't really care and I'm not going to be suppressed just because of some meta-gaming from people who disagree with me so little that they can't even reply.

Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community and doesn't belong here either. If you have nothing to say, don't post at all, but "cheerleading" is not constructive or beneficial to the discourse here at all.

Spirit of the rules vs text of the rules, my fellow. Your comment violates the textual rules. Actually your post attacks me as an individual, so in that sense it's really kinda worse, isn't it? And on the flip side, I was dismissive of an argument in a single line of a 3000 character comment. Oh no.

> Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community...

Not what I said, I was just clarifying I disagree with most of what you said but I'm only going to respond to a few points. I didn't have time to respond to each of them because my lunch period was ending soon. On top of that, nobody here owes you some full-scale rebuttal to a long reply; I disagree that it's part of the guidelines. I'm happy to read them again though.

You're right, maybe I shouldn't have called it out. Understand that what you're callously calling a "lifestyle" is a life I lived, not out of a "lifestyle" choice but because I wasn't saving any money. I lived in a trailer; not exactly a lifestyle choice. Mixed with factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations, you're right - I probably wasn't the person to respond to this without two sentences of emotion.

That's fine. They just need to start paying for their externities and stop relying on being subsidized by the dense urban areas.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

They are. Via the same mechanisms - taxes paid to the county, who maintains that property. Plus, suburbanites bring a lot of money into the cities, even though they don't live there.

Cities could incorporate suburbs into their boundaries, yet cities don't want to do that, because despite griping about their lack of paying city taxes, they don't want to pay to maintain/manage those spaces.

I really believe the "suburbs cost cities money" statement is overplayed. Between county taxes (which feed back into the cities in those counties) and HOA (for neighborhood maintenance), they are paying for themselves.

If suburbs were truly paying for themselves, cities would love to incorporate them. As they do in countries where transit oriented suburbs actually do pay for themselves.

The truth is that row houses is the lowest density that still can just barely pay for maintenance of the roads, sewers, water lines, gas lines, electricity lines, and everything else.

Any lower density than that, and the taxes of the residents can't cover the actual costs anymore.

With the rising obesity rates in America I feel that doesn't help the situation either. Many would probably rather ride in a climate controlled car than get out of breath and sweaty walking. Which is somewhat sad since more physical activity including walking or biking would help a lot here.

Last time I check, these 'dense' urban area aren't exactly great for anybody but cars.

As a former resident of Manhattan, this is where I'm most resentful about car supremacy. I truly don't care that there exist car-centric suburbs. Anybody who lives there knows exactly what they're signing up for. What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces. When I would walk to work through Midtown, my senses were practically assaulted by automobiles. Honking, speeding, stereos blasting, engines revving, cars encroaching on the crosswalk, and on and on. It's an enormous quality of life issue and one of the things I hated most about living in NYC.

"Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.

> What's insane to me is that we allow cars to dominate even our most urban spaces

NYC would be so much better if it weren't for all the car traffic. It's not the density that's strangling it, it's the car completely degrading the experience.

> "Cities are loud and dangerous. This is just life in the big city!" No, no, no, and no. Cars are loud and dangerous. This is a choice. It's not an unavoidable fact of life in cities. We choose to live this way.

Yes! Americans have a real lack of imagination when it comes to city life. Makes me sad.

Yup, I relate to this so much as someone currently living in Philly. We have basically the same issue even in Center City.

Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8

Correct. The car situation is worse there, which is why I think their theories are so whacky when postulated as "get rid of cars" because it fails to be relevant beyond those areas.

I don't want a life without a car within the constraints of the current options for going car-free within the US-- mainly living in a large high density city, and still having to contend with vehicular traffic and pollution. But, I strongly desire life without a car.

If there was a 50K population max car-free walkable town with all the necessities available within said town, I would move there in an instant. I've searched for this, in the past, it doesn't exist. I live in the next best, a <50K population town where I can get most necessities via walking/biking, but have to contend with hostile vehicular traffic that is especially daunting on longer routes to the outskirts of town that are only serviced by freeways (like the college I used to work at)-- I am terrified to bicycle on these routes with 85mph traffic brushing past (technically those sections are not "freeways", but are indistinguishable save the signage "begin freeway" [no bikes] "end freeway" [bikes allowed]).

For long range travel, expand passenger trains. There is an Amtrak stop in my town, and I travel via Amtrak extensively to visit friends-- it is a very nice way to travel long distances.

And are young enough not to being dealing with physical issues/disability.

Frankly, I'm not sure it would work. The population of the US is more than double what it was in 1950. I personally don't want to live in a dense population area - it's overwhelming, panic inducing, yet still somehow lonely.

So what would a car-less community I could tolerate look like? Probably a lot like it does right now, just with more commercial entities within a mile or two of my home. It would also be a lot harder for me to access bigger commercial entities (like Walmart, Target, et.al.) since it would involve public transit that is about an hour and a half away (it's 10m by car, fwiw) in a higher density (and cost) city.

Making public transit better would also really help.

Then you can access those things 10m away in a similar amount of time.

For large items you'd use a car or pickup for, businesses would adapt by offering delivery.

It's definitely possible, but the infrastructure investment would be gargantuan.

I'd love better public transit. But public transit in rural areas (and there will always be rural areas as long as there are farms and ranches, and communities to support them) is minimal to non-existent.

Use is infrequent, meaning it would either have to be subsidized, which never makes folks in the city happy, or cost an arm and a leg per trip, making it impractical for rural users.

Yeah you have to draw the line somewhere. I grew up in a town of a few thousand people, 45m drive from the nearest "city."

With that population density it's never going to make sense to put something like light rail on that route. So these people will continue to use cars. And that's fine.. hopefully cars continue to get safer and easier on the environment.

I think it's the urban/suburban sprawls akin to LA that really could benefit from better transit/walkability.

It’s much easier now than even a few years ago - everyone offers delivery.

Same day is a bit of a sticker but you can find towns near major areas where you won’t need your car most days (assuming you can find work).

> dense population area - it's overwhelming, panic inducing, yet still somehow lonely

No, what you describe is a poorly designed area.

The most charming, vibrant and yet quiet districts of Tokyo or Seoul are densely populated.

It seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that the public at large "wanted" to adjust zoning laws to end up with a car-centric environment. Automakers created the concept of jaywalking [1]. Judges defended the rights of the public to enjoy the streets without cars [2]. Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM, and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies [3]. We live in a manufactured environment, and its manufacture was the result of a decades-long marketing and lobbying effort by industry interest groups, not some grassroots democratic movement.

That said, people generally resist any kind of change. That's _why_ it took nearly 50 years of lobbying and an unelected tyrant like Robert Moses to, for instance, really shift New York City's infrastructure in favor of cars. The question is how to make it clear to individuals why a life stuck in traffic isn't in their best interest anymore and hold the government accountable for making improvements.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

The law against jaywalking is an excellent law. Look at some of those colorized YouTube videos of cities in the early 1900s, like this one: https://youtu.be/1Ok_lwYyHWo

It’s insanity. People dodging cars, cars dodging people and each other. At modern road speeds that would result in mass death.

Besides all that, yes of course we live in a manufactured environment. All environments are manufactured to some degree. And of course car companies lobby for things. But lobbying is not guaranteed to win. People strongly resist things they don’t like. You know what else GM was doing at the time? Selling lots and lots of cars to people who wanted to buy them.

That's interesting, do you think the UK is a place with mass death? (It has no laws against jaywalking).

Or Germany? (Crossing a red light is a fine of a few euros, but crossing roads elsewhere is legal).

Watch the video I linked to. That sort of behavior does not happen en masse in the UK and Germany, and if it did, they would ban it too.

Most Americans don't have a choice.

Why are cars and phones giant these days? Is it because nobody wants smaller ones, or because perverse market incentives have distorted offerings in a chase for product growth?

Why is the USA unbearably car centric? Is it because nobody wants to get around any other way, or because perverse market incentives have distorted the world around us in a chase for GDP growth?

Some people like cars. But the price premium of the small number of walkable places in the US (and the fact that that kind of infrastructure is literally illegal to build today) implies that there is a significant portion of people who like walkable places.

> Why are cars and phones giant these days? Is it because nobody wants smaller ones, or because perverse market incentives have distorted offerings in a chase for product growth?

Do you have kids? If you did, you’d know that many people want bigger cars. I drive one of the smallest cars you can buy in the U.S. Now that I have a kid, I’m going to buy a big SUV. Kids require a lot of stuff. Taking them on public transport is a huge pain. Even if you don’t have kids, I’m sure you’ve been annoyed by a stroller on the subway.

Those big cars are the kind of "perverse market incentive" I'm talking about.

Why do you need a big car to transport your children? Because:

- you can't walk anywhere useful with your kids (so you must get in a car)

- public transportation is inconvenient or expensive

- biking is dangerous

- the big car makes you feel safer because all of the other cars are big

Why are those things the way that they are? Because people chose to drive cars, live far from useful things in the suburbs, and that eroded the ability to bike or provide useful and affordable public transportation.

I grew up in a car-centric place. The "big SUV" as your only gateway to the outside world is effectively a prison. You can't do things on your own. You don't build a mental map of the world you live in. You don't get to do things outside unless it's in your yard or at some structured activity accessed by car. Why do you think the "teenagers hate the suburbs" trope is so common?

I know raising a kid is difficult, even though I have not raised one myself. I know that they require all kinds of stuff to take out into the world. But somehow in NYC people get around with a single stroller and a backpack with kids, frequently taking public transit.

> Taking them on public transport is a huge pain. Even if you don’t have kids, I’m sure you’ve been annoyed by a stroller on the subway.

Maybe at rush hour. But I largely just appreciate the fact that a parent is trying to raise their kid to walk places and live in the world, instead of isolating them in a car in a suburban hellscape. Again -- perverse incentives have made the world this way. It doesn't have to be this way.

Sorry, you don't have kids so you just don't get it. I didn't get it either before I had a kid. All of the reasons you listed, bad public transport, dangerous biking, safety, etc. have nothing to do with why I want to buy an SUV. There are just so many items involved with raising a child. Yes, you might be able to take public transit so your kid can see the doctor, as long as you time it to be at an off-peak time, but there are so many other cases where you need a large car. A very basic example: You have a young child in NYC and you want to spend the weekend with your parents who live in Westchester. Without a kid, getting on Metro North with a small duffel bag of clothes would be trivial. With a kid, you need to bring a crib, toys, stroller, diapers, multiple changes of clothes, and maybe even a high table with you. Good luck getting all of that on the train, especially with a screaming kid!

The failure in your reasoning is that you see parents on the train, so you think that's their only mode of transportation. Yes, you can take the kid on the train for certain errands. Other times, however, having a car is 100x more convenient. And that is true everywhere.

> Sorry, you don't have kids so you just don't get it.

I know you prefaced this with "sorry" but this is incredibly condescending. You're literally starting your argument with "it is impossible for you to empathize" -- but I have plenty of friends and family members with children and very much understand your struggle. Have a little more faith.

Your "very basic example" is exactly the kind of niche case trip where I would suggest you SHOULD use a car because of American infrastructure.

I'm mostly talking about daily errands and recreation in your home city. Going to the park, or the beach, or visiting some shops, or having dinner, or going to the doctor, or going to school shouldn't require a big SUV. If they do, I suspect you're transporting a lot more crap with you than you truly need for your kid. And you're ignoring the negative externality of imprisoning your child in a car-centric world where they have no freedom whatsoever.

I find it extremely condescending to say you understand and empathize with something you have no direct experience with. Like put your money with your mouth is. Instead of telling people to live a certain way, live that way yourself and get back to me. Imagine we were talking about something else, say race, instead of of child rearing. Would you really consider the opinion of a white person saying “I understand the experience of black people in America because I have a lot of black friends” valid? Sounds pretty crazy to me.

Please be respectful in your comment responses. I'm merely suggesting that you could raise a single child without a giant SUV. Child rearing and race are not the same experience. To imply as much is disrespectful to people who suffer as a result of racism in our world. It sounds like you have a lot of baggage to work out, I hope things get better for you.

You realize that people were raising children for millenia before the invention of SUVs, and are still raising children in most of the world without them?

I have two children; for most of their childhood we did not have a car at all (though we occasionally rented a midsized one for road trips), now we have a small one. Traveling with a stroller is certainly a hassle, but they do fit on public transit and in small cars. The crib is probably the one tricky part, but there are several solutions that don't require an SUV.

It seems to me that the massive car and the habit of packing half the household into it for a trip sort of went hand in hand, but this is absolutely not the only way to manage raising children.

Are you advocating for returning to the way people lived millennia ago? You’re free to do that. I’m going to keep enjoying penicillin.

Not to mention that the more stops along the way, the more "legs" of a trip involving subway line changes, bus transfers, and walks you have to make Let's say you want to stop at a park and admire the scenery, stop somewhere else to get some ice cream, stop at the hardware store because you remembered you need something, and so on. Making all those detours is much easier with a car and you're way less limited in what you can bring back with you.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you're in the "Before 1st Grade" phase of life with your kids. When my daughter passed that, there was the magnet school 45 minutes away (but 15 minutes at off-peak), play dates with kids at the magnet school who are flung all over the large metropolitan basin in which we live, Girl Scouts, Theatre Troupe, Acting Lessons, Martial Arts, Bike Rides, Park Days and various other extracurriculars. There are not enough hours in the day to make those trips using public transit where I live. And showing up on time for any of that using transit??? You've got to be kidding.

When your kids are just a few years older, you'll really appreciate that they can get themselves to their friends, schools, and other destinations without your car's help.

We didn't use a stroller on the T and instead opted for baby wearing. When they hit 1yo, we used a cargo bike and that still serves us extremely well to this day. In K-5, they bike themselves to school and camps (not alone, still escorted because cars are still present).

Thank you for raising your children in a sustainable way that allows them to participate in society instead of being carted around in vehicles. I'm sure US society creates plenty of roadblocks for that lifestyle that waste your time, money, and effort. But I'm sure your children will thank you someday (if they don't already!) for providing such a human environment to grow up in.

We must have very different kinds of kids. My kids hate the car, it's basically like jail to them, whereas on the bus we can talk and play together. We don't use the bus, but that's because bus service in our area isn't very good.

The kids may not like the car, but I’m sure they like the lifestyle it affords them.

Insularity and obesity.

No one is swimming across this river so clearly we don't need a bridge.

Your assertion certainly explains why the most walkable places in the country also have the highest housing costs, no one wants to live there!

And yet, the most expensive places to live in dense areas are single family homes. Like how much does a brownstone in Greenwich Village cost? 15 million? Clearly in any environment, a single family home is the most desirable option. People may be willing the settle for a different option in exchange for some other benefits like having a lot to do, but given the choice they’ll still pick a single family home.

At this point I think most Americans simply can’t conceive of a society that isn’t car centric. Some want a car centric society because they don’t know another way. Walkable communities are overall healthier and I think it would be best to get away from a car centric society even if it’s something people don’t desire. The average commute is something like 20 miles one way. This number increases as the population increases and maintaining that infrastructure long term is a waste of resources and environmentally unsound.

Not necessarily. Lots more people would want to live in cities, but it's cities that are keeping people out.

You wouldn't want to build a 10 story apartment building out on the edge of town away from transit - but it's patently bizarre that cities like Seattle and San Francisco have single family zoning within walking distance of their downtown core.

Not really. It's just how the cities where built. If not they would be like NYC and the people that live in SF and Seattle don't want that

> they like the car lifestyle and want to perpetuate it

Are you sure? Polls show that most people in US are fond of the walkable spaces of university and company campuses, European cities, Disneyworld, even shopping malls.

How could we forget the time the American public bought up their street cars and retired them?

That being a major factor in the demise of streetcars is highly disputed. There was an interesting conversation about this on hn last month. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166175

The streetcar “conspiracy” is a tired old cliche. Americans wanted cars. They would have saved the streetcars if they had valued them as highly as they valued cars.

Busses are better than streetcars in every conceivable way except “poors actually use busses”.

So novelty streetcars are much more desirable than busses.

Most people don't influence zoning policy or understand it at all.

True but not quite accurate. Locals influence zoning laws when they speak at city/town council meetings and go door to door trying to influence or get the support of their neighbors for them. It’s not “most” voters: but only in the sense that that is true for all public policy. Zoning isn’t special.

My entire point is that it is not the majority.

> Zoning isn’t special.

twblalock is acting like zoning is special though.

If that was true, then NIMBYism would have no political force — but it clearly does.

It doesn't take a majority to enforce NIMBYism. Just a small, very politically active group.

If this were true, I'd think Manhattan apartments would be cheap.

They would be if there wasn't so much money to be made in Manhattan.

The price of Manhattan apartments has almost nothing to do with how desirable it is - other than the fact that desirability is largely a function of the financial opportunities there.

Park City, Utah is expensive and nothing like Manhattan - so is Malibu and Ketchum, Idaho.

San Jose is a large city and much more expensive than NYC (in terms of house prices). Outside of downtown and a few neighborhoods nearby, it's mostly a car-hell.

Los Angeles isn't far behind in terms of prices - it's the second largest city in the US - and the majority of it is less walkable than halfway decent suburbs.

On the flip side, Chicago is mostly walkable and bikable - yet it's substantially cheaper. Does that mean people don't want that? I doubt it.

You can find plenty of counter-examples based on price and population and trying to extrapolate what people want.

People like a lot of different things. Looking at one desirable place isn't going to tell you much.

If you can make an argument that Manhattan has so much financial opportunity BECAUSE it's walkable, bikable, mass-transitable - I'm listening. But keep Chicago in mind. Because it has all of those things - is the second most densely populated city and the third most populous - yet it's basically average price for the country - which makes sense, because it also has average wages and high property taxes...

Manhattan does not sit atop some massive pile of natural resources. Opportunity is great there exactly because there are so many people. Network effects are large. By the way, I do not think New York is expensive because it is desirable. It is expensive because it is desirable, there aren't enough places to live, and they aren't building more because of regulations. But it would not be expensive if no one wanted to live there.

Everything you said is true about Chicago - and yet Chicago has median home prices.

Why is NYC so much more expensive?

Because people can make more money to spend on more housing in NYC...

Everything I said is not true of Chicago. Chicago has not underbuilt housing for almost a century.

When prices start to diverge from the 70s to today - Chicago's metro population grows from 7M to 8.9M (27%) [1].

NYC metro population grows from 18.3 to 19.8M (8%) [2].

It's harder for NYC to under-build for a century when the population has not grown as much. Chicago isn't exactly a developer's utopia...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22956/chicago/population

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/states/new-york/population

If you isolate just the city - NYC does grow from 7.8M to 8.8M (12%). Manhattan goes from 1.54M to 1.69M (9%).

Chicago's downtown population growth is >40%.

This is pretty far afield at this point, but while Chicago may not be a developer's paradise, it's substantially better than New York.

In any case, though, the original question is whether population density actually makes a place less desirable. The mere fact that Chicago is not cheap (not simply inexpensive, but actually cheap) contradicts the claim that population density is something people don't want.

People want opportunity. Opportunity comes with density.

They don't want density for the sake of density.

NYC has better opportunities - that's why it's denser. It's not denser because it's more desirable, and then it just so happens that it also has opportunity.

This is true for Shenzhen and Beijing and Mexico City and Paris and London and Mumbai and every major city.

I'm not sure we're really disagreeing at this point. Density has a bunch of effects. It creates congestion. But it also creates opportunity. Without the people in New York, there would not be opportunity there. People _wish_ their front door led to downtown Manhattan, and their backdoor led to 100 pristine acres in rural Montana. What people _want_ is what they pay for. And that is to live in places with big network effects, which require large populations.

This is satire, right?

NYC is located at the mouth of the Hudson and one end of Long Island sound, two relatively sheltered waterways. For hundreds of years this facilitated huge amounts of resource extraction from the region. Upon this resource extraction economy resource processing was built. Naturally it was located where the labor was the the products flowed through, the port. From there industrialization and an industrialized economy way built upon the resource processing. Through little other than historical luck of geography of the industries (that really took hold in NYC was finance. It has been that finance industry that has carried NYC through the transition to a service economy.

So basically, NYC is valuable today because it was yesterday and if you follow the recursion back to the base case you find natural resources.

While the natural resources are now gone or irrelevant they were the startup capital for the NYC we have today. There is no inherent value to a mass of people unless there is some productive activity for them to engage in. NYC got lucky and developed a finance industry. See Detroit for what happens when you don't make the transition.

We are in agreement. In the past, natural resources were important for New York's population growth. Today, they are irrelevant, and the value of New York is in the network effects, which are due to the large population. "This is satire, right?" is a funny thing to write in a comment that doesn't contradict what I wrote at all.

You’re comparing incomparable values. San Jose house prices are high because you can’t amortize the land costs. Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose. Chicago land may appear cheaper, but it’s only because they have higher taxes on it than San Jose.

> Square foot by square foot, Manhattan land is far more expensive than San Jose.

People can't finance land. You finance housing. Sqft / sqft for housing, Manhattan is not much more expensive. The land is much more expensive BECAUSE you can build much more housing.

In contrast to Manhattan, Tokyo apartments are cheap, or, at least, their price has remained flat when adjusted for inflation over decades. That's because of government policy that encourages housing supply. Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

If New York could similarly encourage speedier housing construction and replacement, as well as effectively building a similarly expansive and reliable transit network, they could achieve the exact same results as Tokyo. (Note: Even though Japan has had periods of economic stagnation and low birth rates, Tokyo itself has consistently grown in population with few exceptions as Japan has become more urbanized.)

If the suburbs are so great for housing supply, why do suburban Boston/San Jose/Austin/Denver homes cost so much? Why are Chicago's most prestigious zip codes more affordable than living an hour outside of San Francisco?

The truth is that the places with high housing prices don't have high prices based on whether they're suburban, rural, or urban, they have high prices when demand exceeds supply. It's that simple.

Agreed. My point was that the reason you can finance such high-density construction in Tokyo (and New York) is exactly because so many people want to live there, which in turn is because of the network effects created by the people who do live there. It's a virtuous cycle, if you can get it.

Manhattan apartments are subject to a lot of the same price forces as commercial equipment. Their cost reflects the ready access to money making opportunties.

Highly skeptical of this claim. Citation please.

When has public opinion ever influenced the US government? They do what they want and manufacture consent later.

Most people want what they have been told to be desirable. No offense to free thinkers out there, but our mind is mostly shaped by our experiences in society.

It is ironic that the thread that demonstrates Americans' philosophy of car-loving also demonstrates Americans' philosophy of decision making. Sure Bobby, you're in control, this was all your decision :)

We’re also very good at demanding small cars and walkable cities while buying massive SUVs and moving to the suburbs.

Yep. I love cars. Left NYC so i could get one.