That's nice. Many of us don't want that, but have it forced upon us considering something like 90% of all residential zoning in the USA is R1 zoning.

There will be demand for neighborhoods you want and they will exist but it won't necessarily be in the middle of major population centers like it is now.

> 90% of all residential zoning in the USA is R1

well if that's based on land area that's not a very informative number. you'd want to do it by population.

What? No, doing it by population is a bad approach.

Land is the resource you're dividing up. The question is how much of the divided-up land is allocated to an (allegedly) niche usage.

Doing it by population is like saying "almost no one is a billionaire, almost everyone is basically poor and equally-poor, so there can't possibly be a wealth inequality problem". (I'm not saying there is/isn't a wealth inequality problem, I'm only saying that's a dud argument.)

Sounds like the country is the place for you, I experienced all of that in a suburb.

The "living in terror" part sounds like you could use some work on mindfulness though.

thanks for the patronizing, very mindful! not had your stuff stolen then , I gather ?

I have been robbed at knifepoint, intentionally kicked off my bike by a motorbike, pickpocketed and cash taken from the ATM(with a ruse)... All traumatic events that haunt me to this day.

And yet, I still can say that a city is still one of the safest places to be.

Your experience isn't invalid, it's just how it impacts everyone. The outcome of your and mine experiences are subjective, and people who go through them(you and me both) should stop pretending that our experiences are universal.

I live in a decently "nice" part of Seattle. Constantly concerned stuff will get stolen. Have had car broken in to more than once. "Terror" might be overstating if, but the level of property crime is objectively harming my day-to-day experience.

That is less an inherent property of density and more a property of Seattle's moronic lack of petty crime enforcement.

We're seeing a level of wealth inequality now that rivals the level seen in the Gilded Age. "Petty crime enforcement" won't do anything but place more of your neighbors in harm's way. An oppressively policed neighborhood does not make the neighborhood safer.

The child poverty rate was halved under an emergency declaration in 2020. That policy was allowed to expire in 2022[1] and that, along with unchecked inflation and labor-averse federal monetary policy, is naturally producing misery and desperation.

1. https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/monthly...

Yeah, sorry, Im not trying to make a claim as to the cause here, just agreeing that this really does exist and really does make life way shittier in some very major cities.

Just curious: do you believe this a Seattle problem, a United States problem, or an urban problem?

I don't know. I lived in a wealthy suburb outside San Diego and did not experience this problem (I used to leave my keys in my car with the car unlocked, which was obviously moronic but never caused me any problems), and I lived briefly in SF where it was substantially worse.

Having lived, in the past five years, in Seattle, in a Seattle exurb, in a small city well north of Seattle (Bellingham), and now in London, I can say that this is just a problem -- not a Seattle problem, and urban problem, or a US problem. We had people prowling our secure parking garage in my Seattle condo building; my exurb house was in a development where summer days brought the smell of cow manure in through the open windows, but barely a week went by without cars being prowled; Bellingham is a college town and has had property crime issues for decades; and obviously London has loads of thefts and robberies, with a recent trend being masked robbers on motorcycles and scooters snatching phones from people's hands on the streets.

Everybody thinks this is a local problem, but the reality is that, in developed nations, property crime is quite strongly correlated with wealth inequality[1], which has been growing in most of the western world for the past couple of decades.

1. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/crime#:~:text=The%20link%20betw....

If we're throwing out anecdata, I've experienced none of that in 22 years of living in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. We've never had a package stolen from our doorstep. No one breaks into our car (and we have multiple vehicles in the driveway). We did have one little shit steal a bunch of mail a few years ago, and locking mailboxes fixed that. There's homeless folks I only know about because I run the local trails, but they are otherwise invisible AFAICT.

And this, despite the Redmond PD apparently going on strike the last few years (when's the last time you saw a RPD car north of 85th St., fellow Redmondites?).

Virtually anywhere in the entire country?

Most single family homes in neighborhoods of major cities are like this, provided your home is one of the 90+% that is not on a major road.

>I go on trips and need to be able to load lots of stuff in and out of "my" or "a" car without living in terror of all of my stuff getting stolen while I'm inside.

This is not a problem in cities in Asia. It was not a problem before the '60s. It is still not a problem in the dense downtowns of a few small American cities that have avoided the modern homelessness crisis. It is a specifically recent American major city phenomenon that nobody wants to accept as the norm.

people with homes steal things they see available as well. even people who aren't poor steal things, either just for "fun" or because they are opportunistic and trying to just amass more wealth. laptops, cars etc. are not stolen by homeless people, more like professional thieves. I've seen a lot of things stolen, my own and that of close family members. Crowded places have more theft, facilitated by there just being lots of people around and also that it's the norm for everyone to be completely anonymous of everyone else. Have not been to Asia but you certainly will get your stuff stolen in European cities as well (have had that happen also in Dublin for example, extremely traumatizing).

> extremely traumatizing

Words have meaning, and "extremely traumatizing" should be reserved for slightly more damaging things than getting ready to leave the restaurant and realizing your phone is gone. I realize word inflation is a battle that is lost every day, but it's still annoying. See what I did there? I didn't say that word inflation is extremely enraging or plunges me into a mental breakdown. It's just annoying.

how do you know I wasnt robbed at gunpoint? or am phobic of travel and being without a passport etc. had me stranded / without food / etc? make an attempt at seeing other people's existence?

Sounds like you're describing a farm

... in Winter.

Warm months can get noisy. Especially the god-damned locusts, but there are crickets and all kinds of things at night, even when those are dormant. Coyotes—those even, and perhaps especially, in Winter, but at least they're not so unpleasant to listen to unless your dogs are out or you forgot to put the fowl in for the night. Seemingly-endless Canada geese flocks low overhead, honking from horizon to horizon. God help you if you're near water. Frogs. Ugh. Frogs.

But, not so much neighbors' lawnmowers, or cars. Or car horns. Or people yelling. Or anyone else's music. That is nice. And man are the Winters peaceful.

Dust from gravel roads (you have no idea how much if you've not experienced it—dust every surface at 9am, can write in the new dust on the kitchen table by 4pm, on a bad day when the wind's wrong and it's dry), "snow" from combines and various ag processing plants (pretty sure this stuff's terrible on your lungs, but at least it's not all the time and only in some places). That shit smell for a few days when the next farmer over spreads manure. Your hour-plus drive (each way) every two to four weeks for your "big shopping" (and they say cities have food deserts! LOL—and if you think there aren't rural folks so damn poor they have trouble keeping a car running and need tons of help just to get groceries... well, there are, and lots of them) and needing to have a deep freeze or two and maybe even two refrigerators depending on how big your family is. Having to drive that far, too, if your kid needs clothes or shoes and the limited selection at the tractor & feed won't cut it. Forget walking anywhere that ain't your own land.

Got its own challenges. But, sometimes, it is very, very quiet.

[EDIT] Oh, and gunshots! Pretty often, mostly far off, varies a little depending on what your neighbors are like, but common enough I think it's fair to call that a normal part of the rural soundscape.

> Where should I live?

If you just want less human noise, somewhere with a large lot. On my 9 acre lot I can still hear human noise, but usually only big things, which tends to be daytime, and not a lot of it. Oh, and backyard roosters; they're everywhere around here, but only noisy when the sun is up. Vehicle noises carry a long way when people have more horsepower than brains, though; gunshots and fireworks too. Not sure how to avoid those noises. I don't get a lot of artificial light from the neighbors, but there's some; more forest or a larger lot would help.

On the other hand, there's a lot of noise from local wildlife, and wind and rain and hail and other natural phenomenon that creates noise. And sometimes the moon is pretty bright at night. I guess you could live somewhere with caves and avoid some of that, but critters are everywhere.

If you throw a dart at a US map it will probably land on a place like what you described. It isn't hard to find a house where you literally cannot see your neighbors.

A small town in Iceland (which is pretty much all of them except Reykjavik) would do the trick.

But then you have a crappy range of very expensive food at the local supermarket, pretty much everything else you have to order in or pick up from Reykjavik (or abroad), if you want to see live music your choice is “Ja Ja Ding Dong” at the (only) pub one night a week or (again) going to Reykjavik. Want to see the latest musical (or a Grand Slam tennis tournament, or a million other events that are on all the time in NYC) live? Hop on an international flight. And everybody in the street will know pretty much everything you do.

But the mountains are stunningly beautiful, the crime rate is almost zero and you can drive your Super Jeep around to your heart’s content.

I get the desire for solitude but it comes with tradeoffs.

Any smaller city in Europe lol. With a flat facing the inside of house block (not the street). If you want it to be dead silent and truly pitch dark, then northern Europe (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia).

Live in a rural area. Move to Adirondacks, you'll have to drive everywhere - but there's little to no noise and so little light pollution, that you can see the Milky Way.

We moved from Williamsburg to Cornwall(NY). We live in a rural area and there's a tonne of noise(interstate traffic is audible from 5+ miles away) and light pollution(Hudson Valley light pollution is high).