I can see that this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the answer is… most people don’t actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.
I live in suburban Australia. We don’t have HoA’s and the police don’t shoot people, but other than that I imagine that it’s comparable to suburban US.
We have a front and a back yard because it’s nice to have some room. My kids play in my back yard. We also have about 10m2 of raised planter boxes to grow vegetables. Lots of people also have a shed where you can store hobby equipment like bikes, trailers, camping gear, woodworking, et cetera. Some people have pool tables, sofas, beer fridge, et cetera.
There are some sensible rules about what you can do in your front or back yard but they’re for everyone’s benefit. For example you can’t erect a BFO wall along your front yard, because if everyone does it then the neighbourhood would feel oppressive. There’s also some varieties of trees you can’t plant because it upsets the neighbours when it inevitably falls over on them in 100 years time.
You can’t have shops in a residential street because most people don’t actually want that. In most suburbs there are shops, bars, and restaurants a few minutes down the road. Far enough away that I’m not bothered by them but close enough that it’s convenient.
In Australia you can choose whether you want to live in a busy city in an apartment with shops up your ass, or in the suburbs, or on a rural property with no towns within 100km. Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it’s a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.
The housing that people want is the housing they can afford. Sure, I’d love to live in a 20,000 sqft mansion up in the Pacific Northwest rainforest with a built in pool and free-range dino nuggies dispensers, but I can’t afford that, so I live in what I can afford. Problem is, our zoning doesn’t permit really anything except unaffordable, bland tracts of McMansions that force you to drive to everything. If you can’t afford that, then, oh well, get bulldozered, idiot.
I want to make living in my city affordable; if all my kids can afford is a $400 studio with no car, then that should be an option.
That’s absolutely fine, and obviously a worthy objective.
My comment is really just pointing out that the “bafflement and hilarity” from the screen capped post isn’t really baffling nor hilarious.
A surburban lifestyle is nice and that’s why people want to live there and that’s why it’s expensive. You can make fun of people who want that, and you can make a case that alternatives are better in a multitude of ways, but it’s a bit silly to suggest to people happily living in the burbs that a row house would be more comfortable.
We live in one of those soulless, godless cookie cutters suburbs. We had a Russian exchange student from St. Petersburg for a year. He grew up in and still lives in a commie block. In complete fairness, he said it was close, but that he preferred the commie block to the suburbs (largely because it was just so damn convenient to do grocery shopping on the ground floor and catch the light rail just outside if he wanted to go anywhere else).
Are you suggesting, on the basis of the opinion of one Russian kid who expressed a preference for living where he grew up, that I’m mistaken regarding my own preferences?
Well, it’s more like this: have you ever lived in a suburb and a commie block? I haven’t, but he did, and he explained why he felt that way. I’m not claiming it’s scientific or anything
I believe housing choice is a good thing. The problem is that suburbia almost always takes away housing choice for everyone else.
Suburbia is not cost viable.
Notice how suburbs are almost always built around cities and almost never on their own. There is a reason for this; they are heavily subsidized by the city and its infrastructure - eventually killing off the city due to extreme maintenance costs and uncooperative tax base (NIMBYs). This is a parasitic relationship, fullstop.
Suburbia is not recyclable.
It is extremely difficult to reuse suburban infrastructure for non-suburban purposes. This effectively eliminates scarce land until a patron spends 10x removing what it costs to install (not happening). This is why suburbs are often just abandoned instead of repurposed (see any rust-belt suburb).
Space should not come at the cost of the future.
To navigate suburbia (only viable by car) is to put massive strain on the human body and environment. We were built to walk. If you do not, you will become fat and die (see America). Cars pollute the air to no end, and “third places” can never truly be established - killing communities.
Wanting space is fine, but people should find a way to do it sustainably without harming themselves and everyone around them.
I don’t really follow you regarding cost viability.
I live in a small city of about 70,000. We don’t really have a dense CBH. There are small blocks of apartments here or there but not really in a business district.
99% of the population here lives in detached houses in a suburban setting.
It seems kind of nonsensical to me to suggest that suburbs kill off cities due to extreme maintenance costs.
I know people who work in the city’s finance department. The taxes people in suburbia pay to the municipality pay for the maintenance and services they receive. If there were a deficit from suburban parasites the city would’ve become insolvent long ago.
most people don’t actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.
of course! these types of building were an imperfect answer to a problem of how to make enough living space for many people fast enough and cheaply enough. the apartment blocks went a long way from prefabricated panel blocks in a concrete jungle to the point i absolutely loved living in my modern block apartment in the city center in a quite spot between two parks, 10min walk from a train station and a shopping center, with a terrace, garden, playground and childcare across the street and within 15min from any shop, restaurant, pub, doctor or anything else i ever needed.
You can’t have shops in a residential street because most people don’t actually want that.
what? i mean, i can believe you can be conditioned to not wanting it. just like many americans think unions are bad or any other crazy shit like that… but generally no. anyone who ever lived in a place where they can run down the street to buy milk when they run out or just walk sane distance to a pub will disagree with you.
It’s kind of an odd take to suggest that people who have a different perspective to yours have been “conditioned” into thinking that way.
In Australia the “corner store” type set up where you could walk a few minutes down the road to buy milk and a paper was more or less defunct by the early 00’s. It’s just not a viable business model.
I spent my 20s working in bars and restaurants and I did drink far too much at that time. I always lived a short walk away from wherever I was working. IDK why exactly but I’m just not interested any more. I haven’t been trying to abstain but I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a beer or any other sort of alcohol since December 2022. I can assure you that I couldn’t care less about being a “sane distance” from a pub.
i do believe you honestly mean the things you wrote. and maybe many other people believe that too… but if a person born in soviet russia would say that the decadent west is the root of all evil would you consider it as simply their perspective and someone who suggest otherwise as “having an odd take” for not accepting it? there are perspectives and there is reality.
i do believe you honestly mean the things you wrote. and maybe many other people believe that too… but it’s just plain arrogant and maybe even delusional to assume everyone other than you has been conditioned to think contrary to reality.
To me as a European who lives in a medium-sized city the US-style suburb model sounds very claustrophobic. The suburbs aren’t walkable, you can’t cycle anywhere either. The only way to get around is by car. Commercial areas are the same, shops are separated by streets and large parking lots, if you want to visit another shop you have to go by car.
It’s like each house or store is a little island and you can only island-hop using your car. Once you get out of your car, you’re stuck on yet another island. It’s like one of those older computer games from when they didn’t have the tech to stream large open worlds yet, just a bunch of small areas and a loading screen (car) in between.
I’m assuming there are suburbs that have these problems, but I think that’s a city planning problem.
I live in a suburb and enjoy it a lot. It’s very walkable and people bike around the neighborhood all the time. We have a walking/biking path that connects to a larger trail that goes for a miles.
I don’t have access to everything within walking distance, but I have access to a lot within a 10 minute walk.
I live in a suburb and enjoy it a lot. It’s very walkable and people bike around the neighborhood all the time. We have a walking/biking path that connects to a larger trail that goes for a miles.
But have you got anything to walk/bike to?
A bike trail for sports is nice and all, but is it not just a larger island? What if you wanted to go to the supermarket, can you do that by bike/walking or do you run into obstacles like e.g. a highway that you can’t safely cross?
Say you wanted to cycle or walk to the other side of the country (assuming you have the time), could you do that? How far can you go without a car?
Yeah, I had another reply in this post where I talk about it. My subdivision is next to a commercial area so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurants, fast food, gym, dry cleaners, banks, and to a bus stop for public transit.
IDK I we have what you’re calling “US style suburbs” but none of that is true here. I’m an avid cyclist, with several bikes, one of which is a cargo bike. Dedicated bike infrastructure could be better but its hyperbole to suggest you’re “stuck on an island”.
Trying seriously to bike anywhere on my city’s painted bike lanes is taking your life in your hands. I’m on the city bicycle commission and when we tried to pressure the city engineers to put in some flexible bollards to keep drivers out of the bike lane, they complained that they get broken all the time and they’re hard to keep up on. Someone else on the commission beat me to the punch and said “if those bollards get broken too often, imagine what it’s like to be a cyclist on that lane”.
Yeah. Look, I’ve got to be honest with you, this is a huge problem in regional Western Australia also.
If you ride every day then one or two times a week you’re going to encounter some asshole driver who genuinely believes that you shouldn’t be on the road and at times these interactions are dangerous and upsetting.
I spend a lot of time pondering people’s attitude to riders. My supposition is that it’s a combination of a bunch of things, but a large part of it is simply that people would prefer not to be reminded of the fact that they are sedentary and don’t exercise.
Personally, I think this is a problem with people, lifestyles, and culture, rather than a problem inherent to suburbia. It’s worth pointing out that these are the people you need to convince that walkable cities are superior. I think our micromobility brethren, on escooters and so on, will help us by putting more “sedentary” type people into the bike lane.
I’d argue that the sedentary…uh…ness(?) is inherent to the car-dependent suburban lifestyle. The way our suburbs are, you’ve got to REALLY want to use a bike, like you’re either making a statement or too broke to do anything else, to choose to bike anywhere. It’s just too dangerous and inconvenient to be practical. There’s no reason to walk or bike anywhere in walking or biking distance, and plenty of reasons not to (many of them to do with the urban design and zoning codes). People living in walkable and bikeable cities don’t walk and bike because they want to, they walk and bike because it’s more practical than driving.
he’s not wrong the burbs I grew up in the 90s sure I could bike to the store but my current neighborhood has all the stores on a stroad, before kids I still weaved in and out of traffic with a bike or euc but now with kids I would never risk their lives vs these massive lifted pickups it just takes one drunk maga voter to knock into your hippie bike to end it all
Suburbs are not feasible, cost wise, from a municipal standpoint. They’ve been heavily subsidized by the denser parts of the municipality, and surprisingly by the rural parts too.
The cost of maintaining infrastructure in a fit state of repair (water main, sanitary sewer and treatment plants, roads, bridges, storm sewer, curbs, sidewalk, street lighting) for these semi-spread out houses is the same as maintaining it in denser areas without the benefits of the higher tax income.
Additionally, the spread out housing, at least here, has overtaken lower lying wetlands, filled in creeks, and increased water flow down the water courses that do remain, causing erosion, sedimentation, and killing off the aquatic wildlife. Ontario has just started to require Low-Impact Development, standards that require constructing artificial wetlands, soak away pits, raingardens, green roofs, or similar measures to reduce water flow off site and encourage aquifer refilling. These all cost extra money above and beyond what the cost of repair has been up to now.
I work as a consultant designing infrastructure repair and rehabilitation for municipalities, and have seen the cost of these projects. For most of them, it’s the equivalent of their property tax for ~40yrs, and typically has a lifespan of 50-75yrs on the high end.
Suburbs are being subsidized through grants provided by our Federal or Provincial government, which is funded through other taxes.
My point is the “cost” you’re describing as a nice balance has been artificially deflated. Property taxes need to be ~doubled for those areas (in my province) in order to properly account for those costs.
Also this thread was initially posted in c/196, which is where I came across it.
For what it is worth, those suburbs you are describing are decaying in America. Those bars and shops just a few minutes down the road closed a couple generations ago. Many are empty lots or were razed for additional road lanes or gas stations. (In my city: another shooting range for police.) There aren’t even sidewalks outside the neighborhood where I live, and this is in an area developed in the 1980s ‘shining house on a hill’ era of America.
Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it’s a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.
The cost is blown out of the water, but for serenity and convenience goes: the conveniences are decaying and so the serenity is about all you can hope to get for the cost. More than anything though the spiraling cost destroys that balance. Most renting folks I know can’t afford the shops or restaurants anyway because of housing costs. American suburbs are increasingly isolated.
Yeah just as most Americans think their suburbs are the shit. Until they live in an actual walkable city and it turns out you don’t need a car to survive.
Anyhoo. I guess it depends how you define a walkable city. There’s plenty of places in Australia where you really don’t need to own a car, and can walk to everything you need or use public transport.
Still, most Australians choose to live in the suburbs for all the reasons I mentioned.
A walkable city means you have everything you need to thrive within a 5 - 10 min walk. Not just “survive” - i.e a grocery store or whatever. Gyms, restaurants, local establishments, work, etc. Public transport gets you to the next region like that, and is necessary mostly to go somewhere because someone else you want to meet lives further away.
Is it ok if people just think differently? Is it ok that maybe some people want to live in the city and some want to live in the suburbs? Do we have to attack every way of life with every flaw that it presents? Is it ok if we just live?
You do know it’s not only commie block or American suburb right? You can have denser, row housing, you could have better zoning. You hey privacy and and land, but you get isolation and most of your nation are mentally handicapped people from too much excess and misinformation in their life
You must’ve lived in some really badly built stuff (not surprised, US buildings are usually on the worse side of construction quality).
I’m living in a modern German apartment building with about 24 parties. The only thing I hear are when the children in adjacent apartments go full blast at it, screaming like they’re tortured (probably having to eat their cauliflower). Other than that I only heard my neighbor once, apparently having the sex of their lives (it was super quiet in the middle of the night). I chuckled and went back to sleep.
The walls between row houses should be even thicker if build properly, you shouldn’t really hear anything except extremely loud bass. And depending on the quality there even are building techniques to muffle those (I think by leaving some air gap inside the wall).
Houses in the US have thin walls. Nothing prevents something slightly denser without it being row houses, and something mixed use without it having loud and obnoxious night life.
US row house owner here: Air-gapped, sound-insulating walls DO exist here. I never hear my neighbors or their kids. My only regret is having a car when I moved here. It just sits there rusting since I can walk and bike everywhere, including to work. Should have sold it 10 years ago.
I can see that this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the answer is… most people don’t actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.
I live in suburban Australia. We don’t have HoA’s and the police don’t shoot people, but other than that I imagine that it’s comparable to suburban US.
We have a front and a back yard because it’s nice to have some room. My kids play in my back yard. We also have about 10m2 of raised planter boxes to grow vegetables. Lots of people also have a shed where you can store hobby equipment like bikes, trailers, camping gear, woodworking, et cetera. Some people have pool tables, sofas, beer fridge, et cetera.
There are some sensible rules about what you can do in your front or back yard but they’re for everyone’s benefit. For example you can’t erect a BFO wall along your front yard, because if everyone does it then the neighbourhood would feel oppressive. There’s also some varieties of trees you can’t plant because it upsets the neighbours when it inevitably falls over on them in 100 years time.
You can’t have shops in a residential street because most people don’t actually want that. In most suburbs there are shops, bars, and restaurants a few minutes down the road. Far enough away that I’m not bothered by them but close enough that it’s convenient.
In Australia you can choose whether you want to live in a busy city in an apartment with shops up your ass, or in the suburbs, or on a rural property with no towns within 100km. Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it’s a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.
So here’s the thing:
The housing that people want is the housing they can afford. Sure, I’d love to live in a 20,000 sqft mansion up in the Pacific Northwest rainforest with a built in pool and free-range dino nuggies dispensers, but I can’t afford that, so I live in what I can afford. Problem is, our zoning doesn’t permit really anything except unaffordable, bland tracts of McMansions that force you to drive to everything. If you can’t afford that, then, oh well, get bulldozered, idiot.
I want to make living in my city affordable; if all my kids can afford is a $400 studio with no car, then that should be an option.
That’s absolutely fine, and obviously a worthy objective.
My comment is really just pointing out that the “bafflement and hilarity” from the screen capped post isn’t really baffling nor hilarious.
A surburban lifestyle is nice and that’s why people want to live there and that’s why it’s expensive. You can make fun of people who want that, and you can make a case that alternatives are better in a multitude of ways, but it’s a bit silly to suggest to people happily living in the burbs that a row house would be more comfortable.
To your last sentence, I can address it directly:
We live in one of those soulless, godless cookie cutters suburbs. We had a Russian exchange student from St. Petersburg for a year. He grew up in and still lives in a commie block. In complete fairness, he said it was close, but that he preferred the commie block to the suburbs (largely because it was just so damn convenient to do grocery shopping on the ground floor and catch the light rail just outside if he wanted to go anywhere else).
I don’t really follow I’m sorry.
Are you suggesting, on the basis of the opinion of one Russian kid who expressed a preference for living where he grew up, that I’m mistaken regarding my own preferences?
Sorry mate that’s a little bit nutty.
Well, it’s more like this: have you ever lived in a suburb and a commie block? I haven’t, but he did, and he explained why he felt that way. I’m not claiming it’s scientific or anything
I believe housing choice is a good thing. The problem is that suburbia almost always takes away housing choice for everyone else.
Notice how suburbs are almost always built around cities and almost never on their own. There is a reason for this; they are heavily subsidized by the city and its infrastructure - eventually killing off the city due to extreme maintenance costs and uncooperative tax base (NIMBYs). This is a parasitic relationship, fullstop.
It is extremely difficult to reuse suburban infrastructure for non-suburban purposes. This effectively eliminates scarce land until a patron spends 10x removing what it costs to install (not happening). This is why suburbs are often just abandoned instead of repurposed (see any rust-belt suburb).
To navigate suburbia (only viable by car) is to put massive strain on the human body and environment. We were built to walk. If you do not, you will become fat and die (see America). Cars pollute the air to no end, and “third places” can never truly be established - killing communities.
Wanting space is fine, but people should find a way to do it sustainably without harming themselves and everyone around them.
I don’t really follow you regarding cost viability.
I live in a small city of about 70,000. We don’t really have a dense CBH. There are small blocks of apartments here or there but not really in a business district.
99% of the population here lives in detached houses in a suburban setting.
It seems kind of nonsensical to me to suggest that suburbs kill off cities due to extreme maintenance costs.
I know people who work in the city’s finance department. The taxes people in suburbia pay to the municipality pay for the maintenance and services they receive. If there were a deficit from suburban parasites the city would’ve become insolvent long ago.
I would really enjoy a house i could afford.
of course! these types of building were an imperfect answer to a problem of how to make enough living space for many people fast enough and cheaply enough. the apartment blocks went a long way from prefabricated panel blocks in a concrete jungle to the point i absolutely loved living in my modern block apartment in the city center in a quite spot between two parks, 10min walk from a train station and a shopping center, with a terrace, garden, playground and childcare across the street and within 15min from any shop, restaurant, pub, doctor or anything else i ever needed.
what? i mean, i can believe you can be conditioned to not wanting it. just like many americans think unions are bad or any other crazy shit like that… but generally no. anyone who ever lived in a place where they can run down the street to buy milk when they run out or just walk sane distance to a pub will disagree with you.
It’s kind of an odd take to suggest that people who have a different perspective to yours have been “conditioned” into thinking that way.
In Australia the “corner store” type set up where you could walk a few minutes down the road to buy milk and a paper was more or less defunct by the early 00’s. It’s just not a viable business model.
I spent my 20s working in bars and restaurants and I did drink far too much at that time. I always lived a short walk away from wherever I was working. IDK why exactly but I’m just not interested any more. I haven’t been trying to abstain but I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a beer or any other sort of alcohol since December 2022. I can assure you that I couldn’t care less about being a “sane distance” from a pub.
i do believe you honestly mean the things you wrote. and maybe many other people believe that too… but if a person born in soviet russia would say that the decadent west is the root of all evil would you consider it as simply their perspective and someone who suggest otherwise as “having an odd take” for not accepting it? there are perspectives and there is reality.
i do believe you honestly mean the things you wrote. and maybe many other people believe that too… but it’s just plain arrogant and maybe even delusional to assume everyone other than you has been conditioned to think contrary to reality.
But you are the one claiming other peoples perspectives are “odd takes” and you are the righteous one.
To me as a European who lives in a medium-sized city the US-style suburb model sounds very claustrophobic. The suburbs aren’t walkable, you can’t cycle anywhere either. The only way to get around is by car. Commercial areas are the same, shops are separated by streets and large parking lots, if you want to visit another shop you have to go by car.
It’s like each house or store is a little island and you can only island-hop using your car. Once you get out of your car, you’re stuck on yet another island. It’s like one of those older computer games from when they didn’t have the tech to stream large open worlds yet, just a bunch of small areas and a loading screen (car) in between.
As an American, having lived where I can bike to the store I don’t want to go back
You are describing exactly why fast travel is bad in video games too. Convenience isn’t the blessing everyone thinks it to be.
I’m assuming there are suburbs that have these problems, but I think that’s a city planning problem.
I live in a suburb and enjoy it a lot. It’s very walkable and people bike around the neighborhood all the time. We have a walking/biking path that connects to a larger trail that goes for a miles.
I don’t have access to everything within walking distance, but I have access to a lot within a 10 minute walk.
But have you got anything to walk/bike to?
A bike trail for sports is nice and all, but is it not just a larger island? What if you wanted to go to the supermarket, can you do that by bike/walking or do you run into obstacles like e.g. a highway that you can’t safely cross?
Say you wanted to cycle or walk to the other side of the country (assuming you have the time), could you do that? How far can you go without a car?
Yeah, I had another reply in this post where I talk about it. My subdivision is next to a commercial area so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurants, fast food, gym, dry cleaners, banks, and to a bus stop for public transit.
IDK I we have what you’re calling “US style suburbs” but none of that is true here. I’m an avid cyclist, with several bikes, one of which is a cargo bike. Dedicated bike infrastructure could be better but its hyperbole to suggest you’re “stuck on an island”.
Trying seriously to bike anywhere on my city’s painted bike lanes is taking your life in your hands. I’m on the city bicycle commission and when we tried to pressure the city engineers to put in some flexible bollards to keep drivers out of the bike lane, they complained that they get broken all the time and they’re hard to keep up on. Someone else on the commission beat me to the punch and said “if those bollards get broken too often, imagine what it’s like to be a cyclist on that lane”.
Yeah. Look, I’ve got to be honest with you, this is a huge problem in regional Western Australia also.
If you ride every day then one or two times a week you’re going to encounter some asshole driver who genuinely believes that you shouldn’t be on the road and at times these interactions are dangerous and upsetting.
I spend a lot of time pondering people’s attitude to riders. My supposition is that it’s a combination of a bunch of things, but a large part of it is simply that people would prefer not to be reminded of the fact that they are sedentary and don’t exercise.
Personally, I think this is a problem with people, lifestyles, and culture, rather than a problem inherent to suburbia. It’s worth pointing out that these are the people you need to convince that walkable cities are superior. I think our micromobility brethren, on escooters and so on, will help us by putting more “sedentary” type people into the bike lane.
I’d argue that the sedentary…uh…ness(?) is inherent to the car-dependent suburban lifestyle. The way our suburbs are, you’ve got to REALLY want to use a bike, like you’re either making a statement or too broke to do anything else, to choose to bike anywhere. It’s just too dangerous and inconvenient to be practical. There’s no reason to walk or bike anywhere in walking or biking distance, and plenty of reasons not to (many of them to do with the urban design and zoning codes). People living in walkable and bikeable cities don’t walk and bike because they want to, they walk and bike because it’s more practical than driving.
he’s not wrong the burbs I grew up in the 90s sure I could bike to the store but my current neighborhood has all the stores on a stroad, before kids I still weaved in and out of traffic with a bike or euc but now with kids I would never risk their lives vs these massive lifted pickups it just takes one drunk maga voter to knock into your hippie bike to end it all
Suburbs are not feasible, cost wise, from a municipal standpoint. They’ve been heavily subsidized by the denser parts of the municipality, and surprisingly by the rural parts too.
The cost of maintaining infrastructure in a fit state of repair (water main, sanitary sewer and treatment plants, roads, bridges, storm sewer, curbs, sidewalk, street lighting) for these semi-spread out houses is the same as maintaining it in denser areas without the benefits of the higher tax income.
Additionally, the spread out housing, at least here, has overtaken lower lying wetlands, filled in creeks, and increased water flow down the water courses that do remain, causing erosion, sedimentation, and killing off the aquatic wildlife. Ontario has just started to require Low-Impact Development, standards that require constructing artificial wetlands, soak away pits, raingardens, green roofs, or similar measures to reduce water flow off site and encourage aquifer refilling. These all cost extra money above and beyond what the cost of repair has been up to now.
I work as a consultant designing infrastructure repair and rehabilitation for municipalities, and have seen the cost of these projects. For most of them, it’s the equivalent of their property tax for ~40yrs, and typically has a lifespan of 50-75yrs on the high end.
Suburbs are being subsidized through grants provided by our Federal or Provincial government, which is funded through other taxes.
Ok great.
That sounds like pretty standard /c/fuckcars stuff you could post in any thread.
The post I’m replying to didn’t say anything about cost, I’m just explaining why people like to live in suburbs.
My point is the “cost” you’re describing as a nice balance has been artificially deflated. Property taxes need to be ~doubled for those areas (in my province) in order to properly account for those costs.
Also this thread was initially posted in c/196, which is where I came across it.
For what it is worth, those suburbs you are describing are decaying in America. Those bars and shops just a few minutes down the road closed a couple generations ago. Many are empty lots or were razed for additional road lanes or gas stations. (In my city: another shooting range for police.) There aren’t even sidewalks outside the neighborhood where I live, and this is in an area developed in the 1980s ‘shining house on a hill’ era of America.
The cost is blown out of the water, but for serenity and convenience goes: the conveniences are decaying and so the serenity is about all you can hope to get for the cost. More than anything though the spiraling cost destroys that balance. Most renting folks I know can’t afford the shops or restaurants anyway because of housing costs. American suburbs are increasingly isolated.
It’s not a “nice balance” it is literally the opposite of that.
Aparently most Australians disagree with you.
Yeah just as most Americans think their suburbs are the shit. Until they live in an actual walkable city and it turns out you don’t need a car to survive.
I only just noticed this is posted in /c/fuckcars
Anyhoo. I guess it depends how you define a walkable city. There’s plenty of places in Australia where you really don’t need to own a car, and can walk to everything you need or use public transport.
Still, most Australians choose to live in the suburbs for all the reasons I mentioned.
A walkable city means you have everything you need to thrive within a 5 - 10 min walk. Not just “survive” - i.e a grocery store or whatever. Gyms, restaurants, local establishments, work, etc. Public transport gets you to the next region like that, and is necessary mostly to go somewhere because someone else you want to meet lives further away.
Is it ok if people just think differently? Is it ok that maybe some people want to live in the city and some want to live in the suburbs? Do we have to attack every way of life with every flaw that it presents? Is it ok if we just live?
(Not at you Maalus)
I mean honestly …when one of those “ different thoughts” is massively contributing to making earth uninhabitable for
humancomplex life?No, that’s not okay.
Amazing.
I lived in a commie block for 10 years and I’d shoot myself before I have to return in one.
People who claim it’s the future have never enjoyed the displeasure of living in one. They can fuck right off.
You do know it’s not only commie block or American suburb right? You can have denser, row housing, you could have better zoning. You hey privacy and and land, but you get isolation and most of your nation are mentally handicapped people from too much excess and misinformation in their life
Row houses are nice if you want to listen to your neighbors’ 2am conversations and music.
GTFO with your human storage units.
Your buildings in America are built cheap af lmao. You dont even know you can live without hearing your neighbors next door 🤣
You must’ve lived in some really badly built stuff (not surprised, US buildings are usually on the worse side of construction quality).
I’m living in a modern German apartment building with about 24 parties. The only thing I hear are when the children in adjacent apartments go full blast at it, screaming like they’re tortured (probably having to eat their cauliflower). Other than that I only heard my neighbor once, apparently having the sex of their lives (it was super quiet in the middle of the night). I chuckled and went back to sleep.
The walls between row houses should be even thicker if build properly, you shouldn’t really hear anything except extremely loud bass. And depending on the quality there even are building techniques to muffle those (I think by leaving some air gap inside the wall).
Sloppy U.S. construction is your issue, not density. Walls can be built to be sound proof.
Houses in the US have thin walls. Nothing prevents something slightly denser without it being row houses, and something mixed use without it having loud and obnoxious night life.
US row house owner here: Air-gapped, sound-insulating walls DO exist here. I never hear my neighbors or their kids. My only regret is having a car when I moved here. It just sits there rusting since I can walk and bike everywhere, including to work. Should have sold it 10 years ago.
Not sure about the details of a commie block, but apartments are fine.
No matter how terrible your experience was, it was better than homelessness.