This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
San Francisco is a great example. The once bustling downtown is losing business at a rapid click not only because residents have left, but also office workers aren't coming in anywhere near as often.
I predict it'll be a positive feedback loop. As more businesses close, QOL issues become worse, it'll accelerate the exodus. It's like a repeat of the 60's.
Cities are the lifeblood of any culture and economy, after all.
Once they become “hot” they tend to lose a lot of what makes them unique.
Until suddenly it’s trendy to live their again.
Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability.
I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.
Affordability for a lot of suburbs is when you allow for degrading infrastructure and moving more and more towards bankruptcy of cities. Budget analysis for a lot of suburbs show very troubling trends. In essence, living in a properly maintained suburbia is not affordable. Too much street, pipe and wire per capita.
Cleanliness - it's only in appearance. The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport. A lot of concrete and asphalt being poured require massive excavations and destruction of nature elsewhere. More than cities.
Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy and suburbia basically requires a lot of 4000 lbs metal hunks with mostly a single person inside.
Privacy is there, but it costs quite a lot in total societal costs.
Do you have real examples of this? The past few suburbs I've lived in have been very prosperous, as a counter-example anecdote. I don't doubt some towns/suburbs are having financial troubles... but so are mega-cities too. Recall all the city bailout money that got spread around during the pandemic? How much of it went to small suburbs vs. mega-cities?
> The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport.
I disagree here. A lot of hand-waving has been done about commuter cars - but somehow we ignore the miles of idling cars stuck in traffic every day for hours in these mega-cities. Fewer individuals may own vehicles in a mega-city, but the pollution is still there.
> Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy
On a freeway maybe. Inside a neighborhood? You can't hear any traffic noises.
There's been this movement to villainize suburbs and push everyone into mega-cities. It's rather misguided at best.
A US problem, created by the very suburbia that forces people to buy cars. All those suburbans are going to go downtown to work. Naturally you get congestion.
The argument for cities is that you can build no-car-required infrastructure that is both cheaper and easier for humans. Like in Europe etc.
Kind of weird to talk about "living on a bunch of credit cards" when it's the cities who seem to burn cash with little to show for it.
Cities generate the tax base and subsidize the rest. This is shown in every case. It's not good or bad, just a reality of how density works.
We can have moderately dense, highly walkable, transit-connected, safe, clean, private, quiet, socially vibrant, affordable towns and suburbs all over the country.
We just choose not to in large part because many Americans, brainwashed by The Automobile, can't even imagine such a state of affairs.
This means things can be, and are, very spread out. It is not unusual for a person in the US to live 20-60+ miles from their work - by choice.
It is simply not possible for everyone in the US to live in or near these mega-cities. Nor do most people (by the numbers) want to live in or near these mega-cities.
When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere, parts of the city a visitor is unsafe being in... and worse. That doesn't mean these things don't exist in a suburb - but clearly they are more readily evident in a mega-city.
We can go on about externalized things like carbon emissions from the commuter cars... but every time I visit a mega-city, there's miles of idling cars just spewing emissions while in traffic.
If you like living in a mega-city - good for you. Enjoy it, as is your right. That, however, also means I get to enjoy my suburbs. We don't get to tell each other how to live.
It simply does not track that because our country is huge, we must either live in uncomfortable mega-cities or in car-dependent and socially/economically/environmentally unworkable SFH sprawl. Americans overwhelmingly live in one of these two. They both have significant downsides that we truly don’t have to accept!
Americans have multiple health disasters on our hands - physical, emotional, and social - due at least in large part to the way we’ve built our living situation. It’s frankly sad that you think we have to accept it because… errr… mega cities are a bit dirty? You really think we ought to condemn generation after generation after generation of American to deteriorating quality of life because we couldn’t pull our heads out of our asses enough to build moderately sized cities with the physical infrastructure necessary to support strong communities? Good grief, what a low opinion of our country!
Every time Americans use that argument to defend anything that is wrong with the US policy, it looks crazy to people who are looking at the situation from another place around the world.
Neither size nor population are arguments for anything. There are gigantic countries on the planet that do not have America's suburb/car problem. They not only have well-run cities, but they also build fast trains and whatnot. The main trick is in not setting up entire urbanization and infrastructure to maximize profit for real estate, automotive and oil industries by spreading out people to immense areas like in the US. So, in that regard, the people who say that the 'suburban American dream' was a scam, they are right: It can be sustained in a few very rich regions. It is unsustainable for anywhere else. Even in those rich regions it causes many problems ranging from inefficiency to traffic congestion in the cities where the suburbanites have to go to work.
> When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere
Those have nothing to do with the concept of cities but everything to do with the US policies that prevent social services with public spending in order to maximize the tax breaks for the corporations and the rich.
> We don't get to tell each other how to live.
Actually, they do - you are spending their tax money for your inefficient suburb in a much higher rate than your tax money that they are spending for their city. An inefficient system is inefficient, even if those who run that system can afford to run it - like your local prosperous suburb. For the regional infrastructure in your own locale to be affordable by your suburb, a lot of taxpayer money will have to be spent for the society-wide infrastructure. So that the costs of being integrated to the larger infrastructure can even be affordable in your region regardless of its prosperity. From the larger power network to the transportation and communication networks, from production & supply chains to judiciary, police, even defense & military.
There is no small region that can afford the modern local amenities that they have without having a much larger society making those possible through society's aggregated spending regardless of how rich the region is.
It's not really debated that the carbon emissions of suburban life is an order of magnitude more than urban life. They just aren't comparable.
Probably less common, but it is not that unusual to meet someone in Europe who commutes long distance by train. Probably it will become even more common as WFH or partial WFH becomes the norm in many industries.
Assuming such a future comes to pass (And that’s obviously a big question mark), desirability and property values in suburban-like neighborhoods would go up, since suburbs are no longer at a disadvantage for all those things you are arguing, like walkability, socially vibrancy, etc. A quick tap on your phone and 15 minutes later you can be at the bar or the shops or whatever else. Combine that with the remote work revolution and the future is looking great for suburbs and terrible for cities.
If anything, I’d argue Americans are ahead of the curve. In a society where self driving cars are cheap, environmentally sustainable, and always available people would naturally fan out into suburban living, with mixed-use development falling out of favor.
I hate beating this drum because it's borderline stereotypical at this point, but Tokyo really should be studied because for an incredibly dense city of nearly 14 million people they manage to achieve quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy, and affordability
>I want quiet
Visit the residential neighborhoods of the largest city in the world, Tokyo, and discover that you can get quiet with density. These are not mutually exclusive items, we as American society have somehow decided that noise pollution was an acceptable feature of urban landscapes. Japan decided, as a society, that anti-social noise activities in residential areas were bad and makes sure it stays that way.
>safety
A controversial topic pre-loaded with mountains of baggage, but IMO this is a result of policy and philosophical decisions. Japanese cities are incredibly safe at all times of the day -- you can leave a phone out in the open and no one will steal it. A lot of theories as to why that is, but the end result is clear: Japan, a city of 14million residents, is safe.
>cleanliness
Interestingly enough, 1960s and 70s Tokyo was a bit infamous for its litter/trash problem. I am a little fuzzy on how they turned that around, but they did and today it's one of the cleanest cities in the world. Again, a societal decision that has enforcement with teeth. And mind you, there aren't a lot of trash cans on the street. You have to carry around your trash with you if you generate any until you find a suitable trashcan or take it home with you. Yet the streets stay really clean.
>privacy
I will hand it to you, a big city can be a lot less private. But there are ways to create that sense of privacy within a more dense urban residential area without sacrificing density. Also, as density rises, you can get a weird counter-intuitive effect where the crowd affords you even greater privacy.
>affordability
The average house in Japan costs around $400,000 to build from scratch. Yes. You heard me right. When you buy a house in Japan you buy the lot it sits on, demolish the previous house, and build a house customized to your liking (designed and built by one of many competing housing companies). All for around $400,000.
Now, is it smaller than the current average American 2-story house? Yes. Is such a house size necessary? As it turns out, that's also a philosophical question and society over there has decided that in a trade off between smaller house + more urban density vs bigger house + less density, the density was worth the trade. You can definitely spend a million dollars and get yourself a proper sized mansion. But at least you get a proper sized mansion.
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This isn't direct at you specifically, but one thing that frustrates me in the debates between urbanization vs non-urbanization in the USA is the lack of imagination everyone possess. So much possibility, so much possibility that IS ALREADY PROVEN and yet we circle back around the same things. American cities aren't the only way cities are. Our cities can be so much better, they HAVE been better, and we can make them better again if we collectively as a society choose to.
Most of these are pretty cliche. New York City is one of the safest cities in the country per capita. But as with “cleanliness” is usually trotted out in a dog whistly kind of way that really is about something else. And affordability: yep. You’ve got that for a couple reasons: 1. People LIKE living in cities. Good old supply/demand. 2. As this thread is discussing, suburbs are massively subsidized to the detriment of the cities they neighbor.
Having lived in other big cities that manage to collect garbage in containers, NYC's continued practice of dumping uncontained garbage on the sidewalk for collection gives it a very real non-dog-whistly feeling(/sight/odor) of dirtyness.
Calling someone's preferences cliches and dog whistles is a really lazy way to have a discussion and degrades this forum.
