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America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

theatlantic.com

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Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#341

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #223
madhadron wrote: post #14

I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…

I'm sorry, but... have you actually lived in a city? Actually spent time in a public park? Dined at an urban restaurant? Actually been (???!?) unable to reach a public library? This sounds just crazy to me. Literally everything you do in the suburbs, absent long hikes and home gardening, is more conveniently available in an urban center. You don't have to like it, but... that list of complaints just reads as nonsense…

[deleted]

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#342

Post by credit_guy »

jinushaun wrote: post #67
madhadron wrote: post #14

I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…

I’m raising a child in NYC right now. What is this dystopia you are describing? It’s the opposite of my personal experience. NYC is such a kid friendly place to raise kids: Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc… we have it all. I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs. They must be so bored… You have a…

I second your experience. 3 kids, NYC. Outside of the building a street with light traffic. The back exit leads to a little park, with a nice slide and sandbox (actually 2). Within 200 meters we have literally everything: school, grocery store, cinema, pharmacy, restaurants, shopping mall, bookstore, caffe, 2 libraries (one public, one privately funded, but open to public), a ballfield, a larger park with a pretty serious playground, some quite impressive gym that has a semi-olympic pool, and where the kids can also take music lessons (piano in our case), etc, etc.

Oh, and our kids have hundreds of other kids to play with.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#343

Post by [deleted] »

bobthechef wrote: post #109
deogeo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get 'subjugation' from staying at home?

It's the obnoxious, upper middle class hyperfeminist careerist rhetoric that we've been taught to believe. Funny, Chesterton once wrote that he found the feminist clamoring for women in the workplace rather intriguing. Most people, most men, perform rather boring and menial jobs. Why a woman would trade the privilege of raising her kids, shaping the future generation of mankind, for 8+ hours of twisting screws and ha…

[deleted]

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#344

Post by CalRobert »

dexen wrote: post #338
CalRobert wrote: post #316

A city has 100 homes. Local homeowners vote against any new construction to preserve taxpayer-funded parking welfare (aka neighborhood character) This means that house prices are a race to the top so to speak. You're always competing with your neighbors. The first thing you do is have both of them work (this happened ~4 decades ago). Even if you don't want to, you have to, because your neighbors are doing it and they…

>Not sure what comes after step 3 The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth. Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabili…

I don't follow, can you elaborate? People making more efficient use of a scarce resource doesn't suggest falling demand. How are steps 1-3 akin to that?

The price signal called "rent in SF" suggests that there is a scarcity, given that people who would like to have a 2 bed apartment to themselves can't get one. That's not weird. What's weird is that we've let the owners of homes vote on whether it should be illegal to build more homes. It makes sense - it increases the value of their asset. It's just not helpful to non-home-owners.

You wrote "The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction start" - but the government, at the behest of local homeowners, IS propping up the price of houses by making it nearly impossible to build new ones (this has abated somewhat in the extremely recent past).

Do we give GM a vote on how many cars Ford is allowed to build?

Note that I write "home", not "house" intentionally - providing homes for many people in a small area usually means apartments, condos, etc. for the most part. Houses still exist, albeit as a luxury. It also means you don't price land used for sleeping cars cheaper than land used for sleeping people.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#345

Post by CalRobert »

dhdidhdu wrote: post #328
CalRobert wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, of course, is that in America a driver will kill your four year old, and it will somehow be your fault for letting your kid walk to the metro station.

Or a creep. It’s not just drivers who make our cities bad.

Sure. But drivers are the leading cause of dead children in the US.

(Also stranger danger is overstated, most victims know their assailant, etc. etc.)

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#346

Post by dsfyu404ed »

asveikau wrote: post #203
mrep wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Museums, zoos, aquariums I don't know about you, but those are things I'd go to at most once a year so taking the train/driving downtown for those rare events wasn't a big deal for me growing up. > free events for kids, concerts just for babies, more details? > parks My friends and I used to play basketball, american football, and ultimate frisbee all the time growing up. Now I live downtown and the parks I walk pa…

> driving downtown This is your problem. In a city you don't need to put yourself and your family in a deadly metallic stress machine to get places. And as a result you will feel happier and more connected. Even in a city I am sometimes very shocked at what we put ourselves through to use a car. People constantly honking and flicking each other off with various insults and me on the sidewalk wishing they'd all calm d…

His comment generalizes to other forms of transit. The point isn't that he/she's driving downtown, it's that it's not convenient enough to go on a whim but that's not a problem for his/her use pattern. The fact that he/she chose to use a car is immaterial to the point being made.

I don't want to use the word virtue signaling because it's become a politically loaded term and I don't want to use it that way but your comment is just virtue signaling to the anti-car crowd.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#347

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #272
eitally wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an alternative. Don't live in a big city! There are plenty of 2nd & 3rd tier cities where you can get both a house and land for a reasonable price and still have good schools and a vibrant cultural environment. Of course you won't have some things (international airport, professional sports teams, top rate museums), but you'll make up for it in "free" QoL for your family. I grew up in a city of 75,000, in a…

For a lot of people, the city is automatically Manhattan or downtown Chicago. They can't fathom anything but that or a suburb, and to be fair America is very bad at making anything else.

This is such a west coast bubble mindset. Basically everywhere west of the Missouri river is littered with 2nd and 3rd tier cities. Many of them are even within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest major economic hub (though the southeast definitely has a lot of sprawl going on).

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#348

Post by dsfyu404ed »

saiya-jin wrote: post #307
jinushaun wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m raising a child in NYC right now. What is this dystopia you are describing? It’s the opposite of my personal experience. NYC is such a kid friendly place to raise kids: Museums, zoos, aquariums, free events for kids, concerts just for babies, parks, swimming pools, little league, soccer league, skate parks, etc… we have it all. I can’t fathom how people raise kids in the suburbs. They must be so bored… You have a…

No worries this is a common topic - city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city. I'd say look for a cross-section of both if you can - city so vibrant that it offers 10x (or 100x) more culture, events, activities, jobs etc. than you can possibly cover, while ha…

>city folks can't comprehend what the heck is so great in non-city life, and folks that grew up close to nature, open places and good old lack of concrete everywhere can't see an appeal in living in city.

And all the "muh school district" types can't see that the inner suburbs are the worst of both worlds (IMO).

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#349

Post by hycaria »

tathougies wrote: post #57
georgeburdell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure subjugating women to be home makers is going to win a lot support for your point. The problem is that there is no support in the U.S. for working couples who choose to move away from family for economic opportunity.

I would not describe these women as 'subjugated'. First of all, most can work if they choose, because they are all college educated. In at least one family I know, the wife is college educated and capable of earning more than her husband. They just choose not to, and their families take whatever hit that means. I mean, I tell my wife all the time she should work if she feels like it (she is a software engineer actual…

> Ultimately, the most precious gift you can give a child is both their parents at home most of the time

I don't remember this being my dream as a child, quite the opposite actually.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#350

Post by patrickaljord »

downrightmike wrote: post #206
war1025 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got my money on the "We spend twenty years telling adolescents that children are terrible and having them will ruin their life, so when the time comes they have to climb over a mountain of conditioning to even consider the idea" space.

No, people just grow up and see that people are assholes, progeny double so.

You're saying kids are assholes? What?
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