genuinely curious which century you mean?

I'm sure he meant the early 1900s. I've usually heard these called "streetcar suburbs" for obvious reasons. They tend to have a good mix of urban and suburban vibes. Unlike the car-focused developments after the war, these neighborhoods are super walkable with local retail or other spots just a stroll away, or a short streetcar hop. The design is all about pedestrians, with narrow streets, plenty of sidewalks, and often tree-lined avenues. The houses, seem to have been more often built by skilled craftsmen, and have unique architectural details, unlike the cookie-cutter homes you see in later post-war suburbs.

This is all true (if only we could go back in time!) but don’t let selection bias ruin reality.

Most homes were crappy, only the ones built by skilled craftsmen survived. This was also the era that spawned protections against tenements.

Crappy? I'm not so sure about that. I've lived at maybe 15 Southern New England addresses in my life and the three built after 1920 were the cheapest quality. And it's not like they were one in a dozen, or even 1 in 3: from cheap triple deckers to mansions, the area I live is packed full of buildings from that era. The knob and tube electricity has mostly been replaced, but most places I've lived still had gas lamp pipe nipples sticking out of the walls in the common hallways. The entire area is jam packed with buildings from that era.

>were the cheapest quality

In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago, thanks mostly to the building code.

(please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)

but all those buildings are up to code now too right? And the fact that people keep them occupied for so long and renovate speaks to their intrinsic quality I'd think.

but tbh - quality is somewhat a red herring. Today, quality is all because there is caulk (greatest invention), plumbing, and longer lasting paint. Yesteryear, quality was because they used all natural materials which are unaffordable now. Either way, keep a house dry and occupied, and it will stand for centuries, regardless of when it was built.

Homes in greater Boston are definitely not all or even mostly up to code now. My old ~1900 greater Boston apartment still had live knob-and-tube wiring. Fortunately the 1880 home I own now was thoroughly rewired and now more or less in line with the electric code, although it’s still far from modern building code in other domains (plumbing, rafter spacing, insulation, stair rise/run, list goes on).

In some important ways quality was due to the availability of materials, but cheap labor played a big role too. Many building practices before WWII were extremely labor-intensive compared to today. Lathe and plaster walls, knob and tube, board sheathing, fieldstone/rubble foundations, mortise door hardware, etc.

My 1850 triple-decker has code compliant electrical and plumbing, egresses, common area lighting and dual exits. Definitely not accessible and the stairs are typical for the era— the last big brick building I lived in that was built around 1900 was super solid but the stairs were murder— like 7" treads and it was a 4th floor walkup.

Building code hasn't always been an improvement. There's the cost-economic side too.

E.g. the replacement of plaster walls with sheetrock and massive beams with dimensional lumber

We didn't do those things because they're better: we did them because they're cheaper.

On the other hand, modern insulation, vapor barrier, windows, and electrical are strictly superior to what came before.

> In what sense? I think people conflate "big brick building" with "quality". Sure, it's nice, as is some of the labour-intensive finishing work from that era. But nearly every bit of a modern house is "higher quality" than a home built 100+ ago,

Thin walls, poor sound insulation, poor thermal insulation, poor structural durability, poor quality building materials, poor quality flooring— cheap.

> (please don't link me some story of a shoddy builder)

I don't need to link you to anything because I'm talking about places I've lived and as of thus, I've presented exactly as much empirical evidence as you have. And few of the building were brick— almost all of the places I've lived were timber framed. Look up pictures of Southern New England neighborhoods if you want to see what I'm talking about. The television show "This Old House" is entirely based on renovating New England homes from that supposedly poor quality era and it's been on since 1979.

It's clearly different where you live. I know about a half dozen carpenters, including my best friend of thirty years, and every single one of them deliberately sought a house from this era because they are excellent quality.

> thanks mostly to the building code.

The building code will reduce the risk of fires and reduce the risk of dying in them if they occur, it will ensure that people looking to make a quick buck flipping a shoddy will have a harder time doing so, it will ensure your plumbing will probably work for a while— but better building materials were much cheaper, as was skilled labor, and there were quite a number of known good designs for the areas quirks with weather, etc. They were generally just plain-old good?

Selection bias, houses from <1920 that weren’t nice have been torn down. “Only the good ones survived”.

Is this really true? Unless urban renewal demolished them wholesale, all late 19th century neighborhoods exist virtually fully intact. There was no filtering of low quality vs high quality.

Beyond that, in the area I refer to, Southern New England, the vast majority of those buildings are still in everyday regular use, and with the exception of obsolete institutional or industrial buildings, very few have been demolished. Of course, some got leveled to build bigger buildings, but not that many. I would say 95% of residential buildings within a mile of me are from 1915 or earlier, most of them timber framed, and my neighborhood has about 15k people per square mile, so it's a decent sample size.

This is a depressingly good question. I hadn't ever considered we'd be far enough into this one to refer back to the 90's and early aughts as "turn of the century"

That's why I use the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers and yet always refers to the end of the 19th century without additional qualifications.

Define “educated” and cite the survey showing how well understood it is among “English speakers” (British English? Commonwealth Nations Generally? N.A. English Speakers? Non-native/ESL?)

I use “fortnightly” to mean “in 2 weeks” because bi-weekly is ambiguous, and while the game is hugely popular I still assume at least 1 person on any email chain with me reads that and is thinking “the fuck does he talk like a Victorian English Dandy for?”

> the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers

This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.

I agree with the other commenters that this is obscure. I coincidentally heard the term for the first time about 3 days ago (in the context of "socialism by fin-de-siècle" - the expectation that communism was inevitable among the left wing at that time.

Turn of the millennium?

Sorry, yes, 19th to 20th century. Neighborhoods with the Full House house basically.

Unfortunately the US demolished such urban structures to make space for cars and parking spaces. We now get a small downtown with clusters of skyscrapers, and then endless urban sprawl. It definitely made the cities of the US ugly, especially when compared to the European cities.

They still exist in the northeast megalopolis where space to build postwar sprawl was limited.

I am visiting Boston and I cannot stop wondering why SF is not like that. The city feels so much more livable almost everywhere I went. I'm sure there are shady parts, but every time I need to go to SF for some reason I get really depressed.

Respectfully, you’re almost certainly going to the wrong parts. My source is that I grew up inside Boston and now reside inside SF.

Boston is amazing, and I love it. But SF is too. For similar reasons. SF is a city of neighborhoods. If you’re going to downtown, or any of the business centers, you’re not getting the good parts. The enjoyable nice parts of SF are all residential. Because of the hills, each residential neighborhood (a valley) has its own unique commercial street full of shops and restaurants, surrounded by beautiful old townhomes, and as you go up the hills you get vistas and nice homes. The city quality is inversely correlated with office space.

Boston has similar historic driving forces - instead of hills, it used to be a city of (now infilled) peninsulas. You get wonderful old homes in Boston, and lots of streets full of shops. Instead of tech money (which Boston also has) it was overrun first by the education industry, which anchors many neighborhoods today.

could you expand on what you mean by "the education industry"?

I was picturing an army of teachers, but I don't normally think of teachers as folks who earn enough to be compared to tech money :)

I've never been to Boston, but Wikipedia tells me they have several universities - Harvard and MIT, which I've heard of, and also Boston University, Boston College, University of Massachusetts Boston, Bentley University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Northeastern University, Wentworth Institute of Technology and a load of others.

In a city with a population of 600k that's going to be a decent part of the local economy.

Yes, Boston is considered the educational capital of the planet.

Boston itself is about 700,000 people, but if you extend things to a 20 mile radius from Boston (say from DTX), in that area there is a transient student population of 400,000 people that are only there to attend higher education and ultimately call elsewhere home. Within 20 miles of Boston are several dozen (nearly 60?) universities, making education one of its six or seven tent-pole industries.

To be pedantic, MIT and most of Harvard is Cambridge--across the river from the city of Boston. But, yes, the Boston area has a very university-influenced vibe much of it urban with some exceptions like BC and Wellesley.

We do not need you or Wikipedia to tell is that Boston University, Boston College, and University of Massachusetts Boston are in Boston.

There are something like 30 universities in the Boston metro, including some extremely press and wealthy ones. Universities like Harvard and MIT have sprawling research industrial complex’s beyond teaching students. And many thousands of employees, many of whom are high paid professionals.

All that to say nothing of the students. The population of Boston itself is ~600k, while the metro region has ~4M people and roughly 300k students reside in the metro. These are obviously not all local students, but students from all over the world who have come to Boston for education.

I didn’t mean directly that the schools had money, but that neighborhoods and civic fabric was built around the universities. But many do have a lot of money. Students tend not to travel far, so you get lots of self-contained neighborhoods around school. Similar to SF where the hills limit how far you’d walk.

Some of them are even within the borders of cities! See, for example, much of Queens, NY. Forest Hills is especially pretty. If you're not a New York, go back and watch the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and marvel (ha) over the difference between where Aunt May lives and where Peter works.

They still exist, but they are generally absurdly expensive because lots of people want to live there and they aren't particularly dense (although denser than plenty of other areas)

Yes they are. We don't have enough of them and should make more.

Literally all of Philadelphia (and its suburbs going quite far out) resembles this, thanks to rowhouses which allow true single family you-own-your-own-land-with-your-own-(tiny)-yard housing while still hitting enough density to get economies of scale and insanely great walkability. It would be paradise on earth if the public schools were good.

Queens is like this too (except I have no idea about public school quality there, and it's probably hard to afford these days -- but balanced by access to the Manhattan job market)

Governments need to accept that winner-take-all massive metro areas are the way of the future and just adjust zoning and incentives to flood the zone with transportation and housing (which help substitute for and encourage each other anyway), otherwise you're stuck choosing between affordable housing and access to education and jobs. Concentrating more jobs nearby creates more than the sum of their parts because workers are often more productive in industry clusters.