"This is the Free Market at work, and if you can't afford it, you're poor and should just stay home. Poor people are subhuman trash." - typical conservative American
Since the infinite funding stopped artificially holding prices low, I still found Uber cheaper generally speaking, and with a better experience. (I will say that my experience living in the UK does not hold the same; taxis here are generally better.)
If only there was a service where you can pay money to be driven somewhere... I heard Americans invented these smartphones with apps, Maybe they can even invent an app-based version of that paid ride service!
Thankfully with a functioning public transport network, it costs me $4
If going out with friends costs $20 a head instead of $45, more people will want to do it.
One thing I do in DC is ride bikeshare to the bar (where the amortized cost of the ride, with my annual membership, is basically $0) and then take metro back ($2).
And of course this is all moot if you can just walk, since it is always free, which is one major benefit of denser mixed use walkable neighborhoods.
Or even Wikipedia: "The American city of Baltimore, Maryland, is notorious for its crime rate, which ranks well above the national average. Violent crime spiked in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015, which touched off riots and an increase in murders. The city recorded 348 homicides in 2019, a number second only to the number recorded in 1993 when the population was nearly 125,000 higher."
In context, the UK, with 65+ million people had like 700 for 2022, or around 60 times less per population...
Is it that my doctor told me that I have only a 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 30 that I see risks as a worthwhile thing to embark on. Or am I just stupid not wanting to waste my life with fear and not caring enough about becoming old?
Unlucky is being the victim of a random crime that leaves you crippled for life, not a clean death. I follow someone on social media like that, who was shot and left a paraplegic in a high-crime city.
Parts of Baltimore are objectively dangerous and it's not being dramatic to acknowledge that or want to avoid it. At some point it had a higher murder rate than the most murderous countries in the world, like El Salvador or Honduras; coincidentally, people from those countries are seeking a better life in the US, and I don't suppose you would say they should stay and have a burden-free life there?
Not an attractive quality no matter how right you are.
Or you can spend your life in a safe, normal, environment, not just a crime ridden place, where crime of course doesn't end with homicides (those are the tip of the iceberg).
You know, so that you can have kids playing outside, cops not shooting first and asking questions later because of the crime rate, women not afraid of being raped or assaulted, and so on...
>Is it that my doctor told me that I have only a 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 30 that I see risks as a worthwhile thing to embark on. Or am I just stupid not wanting to waste my life with fear and not caring enough about becoming old?
You literally compared a crime ridden city to a terminal illness with big chances of dying before your time. Couldn't have put it better myself.
That people can still find joy in life or live their lives as best as they can, is orthogonal.
People can also find joy and love, and a purpose, while their country is at war, but that's not something we should tolerate as if "war/peace, it's all the same to me".
That’s not to say I’m totally disconnected from it. I know I’m one degree from someone who was murdered, and I’m sure if I knew all the two degree separations, it would be staggering, but again, in terms of my life, I don’t do drugs and I don’t live in a neighborhood with gang shootings, so I’ll be fine.
It's just that Americans in those cities have learned to normalize this violence all around them. They're OK with abnormally large rates of homicide, burglary, theft, rape, and acompanying ill like school shootings, police killings...
I lived in North Philadelphia throughout college and a couple years after. It isn’t a lie to say you are operating at a different level of vigilance. Your behaviors change. So no, Hollywood didn’t tell me anything about North Philly, my experience did.
It’s quite amusing how everyone is saying US cities are safe and great like Baltimore, while they’re also saying “if you mostly stay in the gentrified or well established areas”. Is that even Baltimore then? Or a bubble within Baltimore?
If it's in Baltimore, then yes, it's in Baltimore. Why wouldn't it count? If a foreigner says, "America is unsafe" and you say, "Well, my suburb is safe," can they say, "Oh, that's not America"?
My biggest problem, though, is the fact that schools are unsafe. The fact that schools need to practice shooter drills is heartbreaking.
Yes, people will get mugged in the "nicer" neighborhoods once in a while. It's not something to discount or ignore. But when you hear about yet another gang shooting over the weekend, it's unlikely to be someone walking home from the bar in Hampden or Fells Point. It's in one of the neighborhoods that has seen disinvestment and poverty (and the resulting gang, drug trade, and violent activity) for generations.
On one hand I would love to not have to worry about the crime stats where I live. I don't want to avoid other people because I worry about getting mugged walking home at night. But I also hate the idea that everyone follows the same "move out as soon as you have kids/can afford it/get to a certain age" plan. It's like a constant, slow urban flight where people who are well-off enough to contribute to the city leave and only the poorest and least privileged residents remain.
I love that I can walk to so many places. When the city shut down due to a blizzard, I was fine not driving for a week or two. When it's nice out, I can walk 3 blocks to a massive park and see live music or a cultural festival. I can drive, but I can also bike or bus to work if my car is in the shop. Waterfront is walking distance. Shopping, restaurants, pubs, and galleries too. Oh, and my house cost under $200k (although I bought it a few years before the current price spike).
New England has counties and townships and cities, California and Texas only have counties and cities. Even a place that calls itself a town is still a city as far as their laws go, so advocating your position is going to run up against practical issues with people about why you’re saying their city isn’t a city.
We already have terms for this, and it’s called the suburbs.
Texan cities though, some of those cross into three counties.
Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.
My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighborhood wasn't conductive for meeting people.
Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.
The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.
My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.
I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.
Idk, there are many cities outside the US where I wouldn't want to stay more than absolutely necessary, let alone raise children.
That said, US is a collection of regions with very different social setups and it is easy to move between them. It is common, as preferences change, for youngsters to live for a few years in one state, settle to raise children in another, then move as empty-nesters to third.
If safety is what one is after, one can find a place that is super safe, comparable on safety to anywhere in the world. Someone else would aim for nightlife instead. This flexibility is what makes US very livable for me. Just my 2c.
But I've got to admit that Maine looks pretty safe according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps
Also, it sounds strange to me to look at guns as an inverse proxy for safety. I would, especially with kids, first look at drug prevalence and second at accidents on the roads (both cars and bikes). Which reinforces what I started with: the ability to select the place I want to live in based on my own preferences. Given a wide variety of options, both politically and socially, one can usually find a place they are happy in. My 2c.
The only barrier to buying a flat or house might be slightly reduced access to loans. I found in Denmark it is easier for a Dane to get a loan for 95% of the house value, but foreigners might only get 80%. EU citizens are somewhere in the middle, depending what the banks think.
Language is the main problem. If you aren't fluent in the new country's language, you can have problems with government bureaucracy, school/work, socialising, children's lives, doctors etc. If you speak English these are much reduced in countries with high English proficiency (IS/NO/SE/FI/DK/NL/LU/CY, obviously IE/MT). Or, if you are moving where there's already a significant community of people speaking your language.
Do kids from other countries tend to be accepted well in schools? I heard that at least in France schools can be very clique-ish and coming from the outside the kid can face significant hurdles. But I am just parroting what I heard elsewhere.
Not knowing/learning the language also works for some jobs like cleaning or agriculture, if so many workers are migrants that everyone speaks Romanian or English etc. Also postgraduate students.
Plenty of people from the north who move south when they retire (e.g. Netherlands to Spain, Germany to Greece) move before learning the language.
How quickly people learn the local language depends. Slowly in Denmark or the Netherlands where English is almost universal and work is often done in English, quickly in France or Italy where the opposite applies. Slowly if you're 65 and surrounded by other Dutch pensioners.
From what I know of France, a child from the other side of France can also be excluded, but this is from French emigrants teasing each other. I haven't heard of similar problems in Denmark.
Growing up in London I didn't even notice the European immigrants in my class and could hardly exclude the 40% of the class who were descendents of South Asian immigrants, but this varies significantly around the country.
I expect compared to the USA there's much more reluctance to move when a child is 14-18 years old, unless they can be certain of a place in the French school in Copenhagen etc. But this is primarily because of the difference in exams and language.
Some of us have family and friends here or simply can’t afford to live in the EU if we wanted to.
I do sympathize though. I do not have kids (yet) but our move from TN > Maine is definitely partially motivated by the fact that I said I would absolutely never raise a child in the south due to gun culture and archaic legislation in general. For example most states in the south still allow school teachers and administrators to hit children- most of this happens in Mississippi and TN, then basically other states where lots of poverty, christianity, or mormonism are.
What is it about cities outside of America that make them better? Do you any any examples? Do you have any suggestions what we could do in America to emulate that?
I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.
I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.
That's not specific to cities. My wife grew up on a farm, where neighbours lived a hundred meters away, and her brother had an entire chunk bitten out of his leg by a neighbour's dog. I grew up in a village, and I was terrified of some of the dogs there.
We live in a city now, and although we live in a street with a lot of dogs (to the dismay of my cynophobic kids), all dogs are very well behaved.
> The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.
I guess it varies. I've heard stories of American parents having CPS called on them merely for having their children play outside. Many American suburbs don't have the bike paths or even sidewalks necessary for kids to get around.
Then she lost her job and had to move away, which I definitely didn’t feel any sense of schadenfreude from. We ended up buying her an Apple Watch with cell service and the complaints stopped.
I think us letting our daughter roam free has changed the general mood of the neighborhood and I’ve noticed far more children playing outside. We’ve been the catalyst to get everyone to just chill out. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/04/fewer-kids-...
It may be social, in that letting kids roam on their own is not as acceptable and could get you in trouble with courts. Also, "cars" are more dangerous these days, ans they shift into more trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots and distracted drivers, and there have been many efforts to eliminate penalties for speeding, and the difference between 20mph and 30mph is literally a ton of death.
The number 1 thing I would love for my child is to live in a place where I was not in constant fear of cars when on the sidewalk or street. It wasn't like that when I was a kid in the suburbs in the 80s. And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.
Yep, that's exactly what I did. I'm in Tokyo now, and it's mostly what the "NotJustBikes" crowd is asking for: great public transit, walkability, lots of bike-riding, etc. I see kids walking or riding bikes by themselves all the time. I finally realized I was never going to be able to live in this kind of society in the US, so I found a place that had the lifestyle I wanted and moved there.
The helmet safety panic really crushed a lot of my enjoyment of life. Made riding a bike utterly miserable for me - both socially with my peer group at the time, as well as it being massively uncomfortable to wear. Not to mention getting in trouble dozens of times for leaving it at whatever location.
I usually would end up biking outside sight distance of the parents and ditch it under a bush for later retrieval. But once this rule was enforced on me, my biking was severely curtailed as it didn't have the same simple joy of freedom it had beforehand.
* Proximity to (non-farm) work * Available public/private schools * Municipal amenities like parks and libraries * Basic retail services - groceries, clothing stores, etc. * Social activities/clubs
In short, other than needing a car to get around both places, they don’t have much in common at all.
Instead people have to get into their 7-11 -sized trucks and drive to a store with a parking lot that's larger than many European neighbourhoods.
As a pre-teen, I could go to any of my friend's houses to do tabletop roleplaying all by myself. If my mother needed a break from parenting, she had three different siblings living within a quarter mile. When your average building is 6 stories tall, and your typical street is 30 feet wide building to building, a quarter mile circle holds a lot of families! In comparison, my neighbor from across the street in the US suburbs is 60 feet away, door to door, and a quarter mile circle won't get me to 300 front doors, total.
Even just townhouses which are still "single family" buildings on their own land are roughly 4x denser than detached houses.
Someone walking through a six-story downtown is, by such a measurement, traveling faster than a car traveling at ~90 mph through suburbia.
(Of course, a car can't travel that quickly through suburbia.)
In the worst flat in these terms I ever had in a city over here was 10 minutes walk to the next grocery shop and this was a dirt cheap flat on a loud main road.
Even parts of the town where you have mostly residential housing will have the occasional small shop, grocery store, gas station or similar. If I understood zoning in the US correctly this kind of mixing is at times even forbidden?
To be fair this exists in many of areas in the US as well.
From my suburban single family home in a small town in California I can easily walk to all those things in a few minutes, including 24x7 supermarket, another nicer supermarket, plenty of restaurants, movies, stores of nearly all kinds, playgrounds, sports fields, etc.
People definitely call Ventura, CA “the city” and its 100k.
In the UK “city” status is conferred by being on the government’s list of cities and isn’t automatic based on size or presence of a Cathedral or anything else.
See: Tom Scott on YouTube “the town which forgot to be a city” - https://youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg
The province of Friesland famously has 11 cities, but many of those are tiny, and it doesn't include several of the largest towns that are not technically cities.
> In Sweden, the concept of "city" was removed in 1971. Everything became just municipalities.
> This annoyed Stockholm, so in 1983, Stockholm municipality simply renamed itself "Stockholm Stad" (Stockholm City). That pissed Malmö and Göteborg off, and they also promptly renamed themselves to be cities. Today 14 municipalities n Sweden claim to be cities.
It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).
I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than your Spanish example but it is perfectly possible to have all these services at this scale as well!
I live in a "mid sized" european city (500k), about 2km from the center, and the _only_ think I use my car for is getting out of the city. Within 10m walking I have pretty much everything I need, and within 20m of public transport (ironically, walking can be quicker for the short distances), I have pretty much everything I _want_!
It's right in the middle, close to the central district. It's got everything. From barbers to art galleries, from Portuguese cuisine to folklore shops, from luthiers to really good schools. A bustling art scene, clean streets. A huge shopping centre a nice park and an international transportation hub are all in in walking distance (<10 min), while the district itself manages to stay cozy and friendly.
I have friends who haven't left the borders of this "village" during Covid, it's really got everything. Part of a big city while being not part of it at the same time.
Also, I come from a 20k small town (so right between the two examples above) and had a very similar experience there, apart from everything the world has to offer being easily accessible once you decide to hop on a tram or your bike.
In the village I grew up in (then 40k, now 100k), every neighbourhood had a shopping mall with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a few other shops, surrounded by 3 primary schools (one public, one protestant, one catholic). The same everywhere. Don't expect any bars, though. Or restaurants other than Chinese. I believe the town had one disco that served several neighbouring towns as well.
I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town but it is only a few times a day.
The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).
In comparison I grew up in a sprawling small town in the US midwest which has embraced even more sprawl since I moved 30+ years ago and I hate going back. Its just souless and unwalkable as it has endless land to expand into and no plan to keep it human scale.
I went to school out there and have friends from the surrounding areas, it's nice if you're wanting something more rural but still near things. The key to it is a lot of the towns were built 100-200 or so years ago, when it actually was necessary to build close to each other in community.
Aye, but I bet GP's home town in Spain is much more pleasant to walk in from November to March ;-)
That aside, there are some real gems among Western Mass towns! I wonder, with all the empty land in this country (even in places very hospitable to human life), if it's possible to found new towns built in the "European" model of a central plaza surrounded by multifamily, mixed-use developments within walking distance? Were I a billionaire, this is the sort of stuff I would explore.
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
I guess to me, the real difference is density and how much there is to do. A city has a bar on almost every street corner, a village, no matter how big, does not.
In North Carolina there is a "city" called Brevard with a population of just under 8,000 but you also have the "town" of Cary with population 170,000.
Of course there is still the issue of how the words are commonly used vs their actual legal definition but if you ask 100 different people the difference between a city and town, you'll get 100 slightly different definitions. Someone that grew up in New York City will have a very different definition than someone that grew up in Wyoming 50 miles from the nearest gas station. At the end of the day, there's just some vague notion that cities are bigger than towns.
Although we can't trust the cognates, as 'stad' is related to English 'stead', which meant a settlement of any size.
... I suppose the modern equivalent is a CBD.
From the front door I can throw rocks at 2 more cafes, another restaurant, a launderette, a playground and a car dealer. There is a basket ball court out the back.
Nothing special about my 7 storey block, but when a certain density is reached things start to work really well
I def don't want my kids riding their bikes along the strode to the "corner" store.
Now. for playing. We have a 60km road, and a river. I can tell my kids to stay inside those and know that most cars traveling in there are local, so driving a bit slower.
I wish we had a community center/library around here. I'd love to meet my neighbours.
Transportation is for rural areas. If there is support for transporting people around beyond the capacity of their legs, I'm not sure that is really a city either. The hallmark of a city is the density for having everything you need to live out life right there, never, ever, needing to step into some kind of vehicle. Density but scattering life around over tens of miles or more, requiring travel to live out life, is just rural with nearby neighbours.
I also get the impression that a lot is expected of individuals in their social performances, and so for those who struggle to participate, there isn't as much support.
Valet parking, paid garages, or Uber are all quite convenient but pricey.
Our current society is highly geared to making the maximum profit as much as possible. Oversights and externalities such as parking and traffic are never considered before a decision is made.
Rural towns are a mix because they can't reasonanly support everything a modern life needs, so you still use a car to go between towns or longer distances, and parking is easy so you do small trips too. But your essentials and community are nearby and the parking requirements are just the people in your town.
The suburban sprawl model is the worst of both worlds, nothing is nearby, even essentials, so you drive for everything. Because everyone from the burbs has to drive to the same place, parking sucks too. No community, no parking, no goods and services. Just houses and roads, intersected by busy highways.
A built in semi-mandatory third place seems pretty nifty as far as building social relationships goes.
I'm an atheist but I do remember building bonds this way in those heady pre-smartphone days. It's a shame the baby is stuck in the bathwater.
This is in contrast with dominant religions (including Christianity) in other countries.
Ironically, somewhat-third-place, seems to be most active in suburbs and rural areas. Where neighbours need to work together to solve various community issues. And that turns into partying together as well. It's common to have a community house where everybody can use the space for organising whatever, from playing table games to art classes to random lectures to movie nights. While densier cities seem to be less socializing outside of family&friends circles.
Berlin in particular has lots of parks, and people can go there with drinks, grills, frisbees etc. The sheer number of them means that most people are within walking distance from one. It’s great to meet without spending money. Again, those are almost absent in most of North America. You have to drive to them, so they’re inaccessible to kids. My hometown made loitering almost illegal in them anyway.
* My experience is not universal and is just that: my personal experience.
I love the idea of what cafes were supposed to be a century ago. But nowadays HN or some subreddits plays the same role. Now I can live in bum-fuck-nowhere and interact with other people from wherever. While saving on exorbitant rent just to be close to meeting points.
On other other hand, this kills the romanticised idea of the cities. But are we after „city life“ as a cargo cult? Or exchange of ideas? Internet enables later from even most remote points of the world. While former feels more like roleplaying nowadays.
Community building is slightly different from cafe culture though. Cafes culture is similar to social media bubbles. Community that connects people physically living in the same people allowing to solve practical problems of the day is needed one way or another.
Café culture simply means that you have a convenient place to meet with other people with some regularity. You really don't need to be judgemental and dismissive about it.
For me the most valuable part is the later. And interwebs do wonders in this space. Same conversions IRL may have been nicer, but there's no way I could have been part of them (or at least so many of them) otherwise. And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person... It's not 1-on-1 conversation either, much closer to Reddit's AmA thread...
As for building local community... IMO Cafes are too restrictive. A decent community space wins all day any day.
> And if you're in a crowded cafe watching a famous person
You can go to another café
Another cafe wouldn’t have that famous person though. Which is fine. Just saying that many real life interactions ain’t deep 1-on-1 conversations.
In Germany, there is a park within walking distance, and usually a bike paths leading to it. You can also walk along numerous paths in the forest and along rivers.
In Canada, I would have to drive to them, or risk biking on busy roads. It boggles my mind that you have to drive to the place where you walk. These parks also tend to severely restrict what you can do, and when you can do it.
Sure, there is amazing nature if you can drive to it, but daily access to green spaces is sorely missing.
Not to mention grocery delivery apps and such. Just speaking personally, it's perhaps a little too easy to never leave my home. Doing so now requires a deliberate decision.
So we’ll all try to have our own cars and drive on huge suburban streets and put our kids in private schools and build fences around our yards and vote down zoning laws that would promote density. And we’ll wonder why the people in that cute little European town we visited that one time seemed so much happier.
It's quite possible that we're in a vicious cycle where low contentiousness causes people to be more isolated and more cynical and that in turn may cause some people to be less considerate of others, but if that's true it's still a systemic problem and at an individual level looking for more isolation is the only reasonable solution.
Wild. My experience has been if you live in the city long enough you don't even notice the noise. I've lived downtown for 10+ years in different major cities. There's a building being built directly behind me right now and I hear them all day long and it doesn't even phase me anymore. I'm also on a major drag where people drink all week long and walk around shouting at each other.
I kind of like it over the creepiness of being in a quiet empty house with nobody nearby..
I notice gunshots for sure but haven't heard many (any?) of those in Denver vs Dallas.
I've been living in a big European city for more than ten years now. I can kinda forget about the noises surrounding me, but I always tend to feel less tense when I leave for the countryside. And when I get back, sure enough, I hear all the random noises again. Upstairs neighbor dragging a chair when sitting at the table. Other neighbor taking a piss. Neighbor from across, blasting his TV or his kid crying for whatever reason.
There is never a moment of respite in the city. You wake up, you got your neighbors doign their thing. On your way to the office / park / groceries, you got the traffic noise. At the office: the AC hum and useless office chat. On the way home, traffic again. Back home? Neighbors are back, too.
I grew up just outside a decent-sized city in Canada, now living in Texas...both places, on septic. Its not rare.
I live on 3.5 acres and have a water treatment system and part of the reason is that there's a shortage of homes I _actually_ wanted, which are decent flats in the city where my kids can bike to school, so they're very expensive.
except they don't think that
the Americans nod politely and whisper to each other "can you imagine living that close to your neighbors? nooooo thank you!"
HN needs to just drop this notion that anyone opposed to density is a caveman. I love the fact that my neighbors can't see me and I can't see them. Everyone is one an acre minimum. We like it like that and we're not even Literal Nazis!
I totally agree with that. I've been a city dweller (in Europe) for 45 years or so and hated every second of it. I then lived in suburbia for 5 years and liked it much better.
I then just spent one year in the countryside in a very remote area and loved it. I knew my neighbors (but we all had big plots so it's not as if we could see each other) and already have made friends there.
Now I'm back to european city life and not one of the worst city (Luxemburg) and yet I hate it already. Shitty miserable apartment life, stacked on top of each others like ants "because density".
Just fuck that.
I'm going back to the country side as soon as I can.
My favorite, but less practical, choice is also countryside. :p
Suburbs are a compromise for sure, but instead I'd call them a combination of some of the best of both worlds.
Personally now as an adult I'd rather live in a much more rural area to have more land and space to do things, but for children that's kind of boring. So this suburban area gives convenient walkable access to activities, places and friends for kids while still at least having a bit of space and land for the adults.
When I lived in San Jose I trusted my immediate neighbors but someone on the street was basically a neighborhood watchdog for unkept lawns and cars that were parked too long. The neighborhood was mostly rentals, so landlords were responsible for lawn maintenance but of course these watchdog folks like to take their frustrations out on other renters. Our neighborhood never got together, just immediate neighbors, and people that lived close enough would Uber.
In contrast, when I lived in one of the poorer areas of Fort Worth and now living in the more working class area of Portland my trust for my entire street is sky high. We have friends, people help out and look out for each other. We have block parties, if there's disputes people talk it out, etc
All three are walkable places, and I live most of my life inside 5 city blocks. I'm not sure what factors make a successful community on a given street, but there are certain people that can make the entire experience miserable through seemingly insignificant actions (to them).
Try it out.
Not if you get killed by a car. That's his point.
Bikes are great, but much more so in a society that recognises the benefits of bikes than in a society that sees than as alien and as targets.
It does help when more people start to bike. There is safety in numbers, not to mention more understanding and recognition. Netherland has the advantage that we've never really gotten rid of our bikes; as soon as cars were about to take over in the 1960s, people started to fight back. People here have been fighting for bikes and against cars for more than 50 years. In the US, that fight doesn't even have remotely the kind of momentum that it had in Netherland 50 years ago, so there's quite a lot of distance to catch up there.
I used to live in downtown of my 600k city. Moved back to outskirts of the same city. Driving is the smallest issue to meet.
Reading those discussions from afar, it feels like Americans are using urban sprawl as a scapegoat. While it's a problem everywhere else too. Even if you take away urban sprawl and driving, the problem will be there.
I could say the same about my socialising now and a decade ago. But in reality a lot of other things happened - kids, parents getting old, mortgages and housing to take care of, stable jobs with more responsibilities, more resources (both time and money) spent on healthcare... It all adds up.
For anyone that's curious about numbers on this, every western country has a long-running social survey that asks how many close friends the respondent has. This data is usually freely available.
Dutch stereotype is to be 'friendly' outward but always keep people who you aren't close to at a distance. That attitude comes back to bite you when you move away past your early 20s or use your work life as your social lifeline in today's work environment. If it wasn't for social services, the consequences would be far worse. But those social services are also contributing to what keeps the majority from staying close together in the first place.
If anything it’s, probably irrationally, turning me off to urbanism concepts. I think that when something becomes so trendy and so dogmatic, I subconsciously start to feel an aversion to it and assume it’s snake oil, whether that’s true or not.
The other benefits of the higher density living does work though. More small businesses and shops nearby, hobby points of interest in the 15-30 minutes distance on foot or bus/tram, better infrastructure, etc.
In a suburb many of my friends would be 15+ minutes away by car. In the city I live in now (almost entirely apartments/multi-household buildings), almost all of my friends are within a 15 minute walk. It has been a massive improvement to my social life, mostly due to the ease at which gatherings can spontaneously/easily occur.
I think that might perhaps be the biggest issue in the US. There seems to be a massive amount of distrust separating people. And some groups are eagerly amplifying that distrust with their culture war nonsense.
There might not be a way out for the US until that issue is solved.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/how-urb...
> Four-in-ten rural residents say they know all or most of their neighbors; the shares are smaller among those living in urban (24%) and suburban (28%) areas.
That was not the case earlier where people who were related lived fairly close to each other. This is particularly true in places like Asia, Africa and parts of Europe even today.
Staying close together requires adjustment and also requires people to value the close proximity of others.. This is sadly something which has largely disappeared particularly in North America
I had always known for a long time the "why" I didn't want to go out on weekends and such, but it wasn't until I watched some of those videos from "Not Just Bikes" that it really, really struck me. I literally dread finding parking more than I enjoy finding friends.
And suburban (and frankly disturbingly high percentages of urban) America IME is a strange cross between in constant proximity of others, and constant suspicion of others. Like there's just enough people around to not be alone, but not enough to feel safe for many.
There's another comment in this thread positing that the social closeness of the old days broke down because of more urbanization, but it's clear it's sprawl that's killing socialization.
The other day a friend and I were talking about cities since I complain a lot about this now, and we did a quick check: Houston is far, far LARGER than say, Zurich, but their population density is a fraction. Everyone lives in cars that don't talk to each other, going to little boxes that mostly don't talk to each other. And the parking lots required for people to travel to a restaurant or bar means that there's less restaurants and bars.
Incidentally, I've found a single combination pedestrian/bike trail near me, and it's busier than the other trails, and people there are so much friendlier. It's a joy to go, and I'm slowly realizing I may still be introverted, but being out and about without it being a chore actually alleviates a lot of my anxiety.