Sadly this rings somewhat true, I'm trying to make the maths work on moving from my house in the horrible Irish countryside (horrible if you don't like profound isolation and car-dependency, that is) and move to Utrecht or Houten, or Freiburg, and it is challenging, to say the least.

I like profound isolation... what's the bandwidth like? (The other thing that ties a lot of us to cities).

It's excellent. Gigabit fibre. I mapped out the rural fibre routes (along with other infra) and current real estate listings. Threw it up at gaffologist.com if you're curious. Note that I am not a front-end dev and it shows.

All I can say is that I'm so impressed by this.

Good luck - I have a friend in Utrecht and he's happy there but IIRC he's renting and will do so for the remainder of his life.

I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so going somewhere more expensive is out of the question.

I'd rather rent somewhere I can walk to the pub then live in my current paid-off house where I'm just lonely all the time. It's beautiful but that only goes so far.

The Netherlands at least has functional health service, among other things. Ireland does not.

Ireland is horrible at everything. The health service is in collapse, the immigration bureau is incompetent, crime is legal (the garda told me not to vote Green... now remember they're the ones enforcing environmental laws), transport is a joke, the bike infrastructure is 30 years behind the continent, and for all that the taxes are quite high if you make anything resembling a decent salary. But if you DO have the gall to earn gasp over 50,000 a year, you're a fat cat with "notions". And imagine you build a house and at some point need to rent it out? You're a monster landlord scumbag - might as well be from the plantations and evicting those poor poor people who trash your house and don't pay rent for months on end!

I posted this after being told it would take me six months to get my 3 year old to a pediatrician. https://np.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/11luo2b/how_can_i_s... - when she stopped growing.

This country is unacceptably bad. I look forward to leaving.

"Crime is legal" "The Garda told me not to vote Green"

These 2 things are not the same.

Right but the'point is we have a very unprofessional police force.

Yeah, unfortunately it seems very much like we're heading the opposite direction. People largely congregated in cities because of proximity to work, but as remote work increases that's becoming less of a factor. As people try to find cheaper property and more land, they're going to end up in places where bikes are a whole lot less practical.

> bikes are a whole lot less practical I'm sure you meant as daily transportation. As a non-daily, I bike several times per week even if I drive daily.

If I had my choice, I'd rather ride horses every day.

That's my plan should the EU ever mandate a 30km/h speed limit in cities.

If I'm gonna move slowly, might as well do it in style.

bikes are great in small towns with decent infrastructure. the range from 20k to 100k people is kind of perfect for biking because they are a bunch smaller than big cities. in actually rural and suburbia they aren't as good but small towns are perfect.

I’ve had a bicycle as my main mode of transportation for years in a 1M people city.

Even if proximity to work were to be completely irrelevant for everyone, a lot of people (most?) would want to be close to something, be it their hobbies, hospitals, restaurants or at the very least shops. If your hobby is growing groceries and something outdoorsy (including road/gravel/mountain cycling!) and don't mind doing big shops/having to drive when you open a drawer and you realize that you ran out of oregano, then living in an isolated area is a valid choice (despite it increasing your individualized carbon footprint; if you fly more than once a year then that will dwarf almost any other lifestyle choice you make on that front).

I live in a city despite working remotely since the pandemic started, not because of proximity to the offices I might have to go back to, but rather because I can walk a block to buy groceries. I know people that live <.5 mile away from a Safeway in the peninsula that drive there because the streets are not very pedestrian or cyclist friendly.

I mean the reality of it is that cars are damned convenient and it's way easier to drive, even for three minutes, than walk for 15 minutes, especially if there's a suburban parking lot at the other end. Getting people out of that habit is an uphill battle, and I'd be lying if I said I've never driven those three minutes to Safeway vs walk. Especially if I'm grabbing a months worth of groceries for the whole house.

What's different now is ebikes/related which allows those three minutes to be done via bike. Dean Kamen claimed that cities would be redesigned around the Segway. He was too early, and only half right, but I think his claim was more prescient than we give him credit for. Ebikes, as we're hearing about here in London, really are enabling a new kind of city design that takes advantage of this semi-new technology.

Schools inner city are (typically) terrible.

That's _very_ american assumption. All good schools are "inner" city in my country.

I like in the UK, and find any suggestion that I have even a thought in common with Americans offensive.

The term "inner city" is very American loaded, so I apologise for this slight.

A bit of refinement on that thought. In America, inner-city schools are mixed bag. If you live in someplace like Cambridge, schools tend to be good. Boston is a mixed bag. Same is true for other adjacent cities. However if you go to places like Westford, Newton, Wellesley which are very high earner high value properties, the schools tend to be consistently very good. Then you start moving into more rural places in Massachusetts like Pepperell, Townsend, Athol and again the schools are more like inner-city schools, underfunded and not very good quality.

I think the best way to judge the quality of schools by the opportunities the student's have as a result of going through the schools. The Westford, Newton, Wellesley schools are for winners of the birth lottery. Leominster, Townsend, Athol are for us birth lottery losers.

>A bit of refinement on that thought. In America, inner-city schools are mixed bag. If you live in someplace like Cambridge, schools tend to be good. Boston is a mixed bag. Same is true for other adjacent cities. However if you go to places like Westford, Newton, Wellesley which are very high earner high value properties, the schools tend to be consistently very good. Then you start moving into more rural places in Massachusetts like Pepperell, Townsend, Athol and again the schools are more like inner-city schools, underfunded and not very good quality.

How much of that is the quality of the schools and how much of that is just richer parents who can/will pick up the slack in the event that the school system doesn't do the job as well as they want it done?

If stats on median and per capita income are to be believed then the kid from Wellsley has a huge leg up on the kid from Athol even if you assume they get the same education.

For better or worse the quality of public schools depends far more on crime rates and income levels of the surrounding community than on school funding levels. There's very little that schools can do to to help pupils who are growing up in a difficult environment. By all means let's fund schools appropriately, but that's only going to make a marginal difference in outcomes.

A lot of American school districts depend on property tax values for funding. You get natural class-based school segregation as a result.

Parents with kids move to the suburbs for schooling, parents that are mobile and move for schooling bring to the suburbs things that make schools better (taxes / school meddling etc) which makes parents with kids move to the suburbs for schooling which ...

Ah that's a bit of a false dichotomy though. In between a rustic rural house on several acres down a dirt unpaved road unsuitable for bicycles, and a tiny, loud, one-bedroom downtown apartment condo in a highrise, or worse - one bedroom in a shared flat, in a superurban locale, say Hong Kong, right above the nightlife or red light district, trying to raise a family of three or four; somewhere between the two extremes is a livable medium. Maybe a three-bedroom condo with a shared yard and pool raise a family in. A nestled away cute 2-bedroom cottage with a tiny yard at the edge of the city, but still within subway distance.

Now, I'll concede that most cities in the US aren't designed this way. I'll go further and say that most cities in the US lack the density to deserve being called cities, they're just large swaths of adjacent suburbia with a tiny downtown district that most people drive to in order to access, which has huge implications on traffic and parking.

What recent changes in society has enabled us to see is just how much we were sold a crock of shit while on our way to buying 5-bedroom McMansions with expansive yards for hosting dinner parties. If the cost is a one hour each way commute, people are starting to see it's not actually worth it.

So I agree/you're right - real estate prices have to fall dramatically in order for things to be accessible to the non-rich households who aren't on dual tech worker salaries, and who can't afford a reasonably sized (2+ bedroom) urban apartment. But for better or worse, HN skews affluent, so there are undoubtedly readers here able to afford a 4-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer neighborhoods of San Francisco where you'd want to raise a family. Pretending otherwise does no body any favors. The only question is how do we get from where we are today, which is that it's unaffordable to all but the upper-middle and upper class, to a place where is affordable on a single wage earners salary? The only answer to that is to build more housing. Stopgap measures like rent control don't work. It may be anathema to some, but part of that may include the government stepping in to make that happen.

Ebikes allow us to get from here to there, as an ebike allows a slightly more sprawling city design, due to the added range enabled by an ebike vs walking+non-existent public transportation, which means we can get a lot of mileage by repainting and modifying existing roads to add bike-safe infrastructure without ripping out and replacing buildings, which is basically impossible.

There's a middle-ground between suburban sprawl and one-bedroom-apartments in highrises. Dense old-fashioned streetcar suburbs that predate the invention of driveways do a great job of being cyclist and transit friendly despite the fact that every home is a detached SFH.

I know, because I grew up in what I consider the pinnacle of urbanism - the humble commie block.

Unfortunately even commie blocks nowadays are either becoming too expensive or get "densified" - new blocks are built in between them, often without much of a plan.

This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.

This bothers me because I'm in the market for an apartment and it's becoming a race against time due to rising prices.

Hah, yeah. We're in a terrible housing crisis here in Ontario (houses around Toronto are now worth over a million) and tent-cities are cropping up everywhere, and "commie blocks" are what anti-urbanists point to when they complain about the new housing going in to meet demand, and all I can think is that I'll take Khrushchyovkas over tent-cities any day of the week.

> This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.

This is always the question. If even half of them are getting rented out, then at least new units are adding to the market and helping to battle rent... but it seems like governments are so crippled in their ability to know for certain how many people live in how many units.

Yeah, the american streetcar suburb truly is a gem, doesn't really exist on that scale in Europe. Lush, spacious, and verdant, but also walkable, with city feel and city amenities. Always great architecture. Mix of home sizes makes them naturally mixed income. Commercial corridors often preserved their function. So awesome, if only more newer suburbs were like that.

> Mix of home sizes makes them naturally mixed income.

Sadly, I don't think this will last if current trends continue. The town next to mine has a ton of duplexes but it's all zoned single-family now, so you couldn't build those today if you had to.

This sounds like Yogi Berra's complaint of "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Real estate in cities being expensive is evidence that people really want to live in environments like that.

Will be interesting to see if other municipalities try to build similar housing and work environments (more walkable, less parking lots) to attract the people looking for a city life style.