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America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

theatlantic.com

391–400 of 443 posts

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They must be so bored… Your preconceived notions of what suburban living is like are just as inaccurate as the perceptions of city life of the person you responded to.

I grew up in suburbs, and couldn't go anywhere without a car, so I was very bored and watched a lot of television (though I read a lot of books, too). Currently raising two kids in an urban center, and I'm excited for them to have way more opportunities than I had.

I am glad you are giving your kids more opportunities than you had. I did not have the same experience growing up in a suburban environment, and my kids aren't the least bit lacking for activities, so to each their own. My suburban neighborhood also has transit service, so there's that.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that increasing their own home values is part of it, but here in the North East where I live when I hear co-workers making the case for restricting housing development they're concerned about one of two things. Either that if their town was more affordable the wrong sort of person would move in, they'd go to school with their kids, and either harm their kids or teach them bad habits. Or that more people…

Do you then remind them that they might need to check their biases? After all, kids learn all sorts of dubious things from "innocent" Places and well-off kids use things like drugs at a similar rate. They are simply less likely to get caught because they have unsupervised large back yards and things like that.

That opens a fun argument. "Don't worry about your white child mixing with other races, because if he ends up dealing drugs to them, it will be OK because prosecutors will blame the black kids".

More seriously, preferring rich neighbors isn't rooted in racism, it's a cause of racism. Why don't you want poor people moving into your neighborhood? For the exact reason poor people want to move into your neighborhood! Because proximity to wealthy is valuable, and proximity to poverty is less valuable.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dose that city still exist? Would love that experience...

It exists if you want to find it. Hint: It doesn't exist inside of a startup's office space. I've been to 60 countries, and there's nowhere in the world that has SF's diversity of music, art, food, cultures, peoples, points of view, businesses, and climates. The underground warehouse scene is still alive and well, as is the underground/aboveground bdsm/sex scene, the world music scene, hip-hop, bluegrass, techno (ugh…

Considering how expensive underground warehouses are getting (to the point where only techies can afford those warehouse loft apartments, even the illegal ones), I find it hard to believe that the culture is thriving. Just look at what happened to Burning Man for an example. Now the art projects aren't built in SF by attendees and driven over they are purchased and imported.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

A Midwestern 3rd tier city is the same as a coastal megalopolis suburb.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a suburb and was bored shitless. I had one friend that lived within walking distance, and everyone else was too far away to get to without a car, which meant that I didn't get to see my friends unless it was convenient for one of my two parents (who both held full-time jobs). Cycling anywhere outside of the local neighborhood was out of the question, since the roads connecting neighborhoods were full of…

My early teenage years were in the city, my later teens in the suburbs. I hated that move to the burbs... Nothing to do except getting kicked out of the local mall or Borders. No libraries, no parks, no pools nearby... And no public transport. When before in the city I could just take public transport and go downtown, meet my friends, go to the library, etc.. Now that I have kids, I live in a city. But it's a quiet n…

You have a yard with public transit? That's clearly not scalable; it must be very expensive property.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#396

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…

Building apartments in your backyard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20474724

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#397

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…

Growing up, I had several of those in the suburbs in the suburbs too. And even then, my parents would take me into the city on weekends to visit the zoo and museums (I don't remember going to the aquarium, but we had one too).

But then again, where I grew up is very different from NY. My parents are both from NYC, and my cousins are both raising kids in the NYC area (one in the city, one in the suburbs), but my parents moved to Dallas a few years before I was born, and I grew up in Dallas but still got to visit my family in NY. NYC's strength is also the most aggravating thing about it: everything is in the city. This means that the suburbs are just bedroom communities with nothing to do. Visiting my family in Westchester has always felt like spending time out in the country. Dallas, on the other hand, is distributed and spread out. Except for a teeny tiny urban core, we're all suburb. We have edge cities everywhere instead of concentrating everything on one place. The suburbs where I grew up are also much denser than the suburbs where my cousins grew up, which helps.

One interesting study though is with my cousins in NY. They have three kids each, and both are fairly wealthy (honestly, they make more in a year than I'll ever see in my life). One of them lives in a swanky apartment on the Upper West Side, in walking distance of both Central Park and Lincoln Center. The other lives in a large house in Westchester, not far from where she grew up. I can say that, for my cousin who lives in the city, her kids have access to everything you mentioned, and she and the kids are very happy with where they live. But she's also filthy rich and is able to afford a very large apartment in a prime location. Not many people in Manhattan have that kind of privilege. Before she moved to the suburbs, my other cousin used to live in a teeny tiny two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City. When she had twins, there was pretty much no space for anything, and as soon as she got pregnant with her third kid, she and her husband immediately began looking for a house in the suburbs, and they moved right after she gave birth. It's a giant house with six bedrooms, an expansive basement, and a backyard that won't quit. She told me that while she misses her short commute, it's all worth it to give the kids a perfect environment to grow up in. And the kids certainly have no lack of anything to do: when I visited last year, the kids were all involved in multiple sports leagues and other activities. Everyone is happy with where they live.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#398
post #338

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…

The cycle doesn't always repeat. The cycle only repeats if fertility rates stay where they always have been... the elk continue to attempt procreation at the rates they always have.

Then,once the foraging/pasture regrows, that rate being the same, the elk rebound.

Calhoun proved this. The mice would, despite having everything they needed, despite the population crash giving them the space they apparently required, just not procreate. Lots of bizarre behaviors, but no procreation.

No little girl who has grown up an only child, most of the adults in her life either having just one child or even none at all, will say "I want to have 2.1 children when I grow up!". And it would have to be every little girl that did that for replacement fertility. If only a few do it, then the number has to be higher than 2.1 for it to average out.

The implication is that fertility rates can only ever fall, and never rise. We're more like Calhoun's mice than we are like some cervines that have outgrown their food supply.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, good point, but you should be more precise: strollers with HUMAN KIDS in them. I swear that at least one in two, perhaps even more, of these strollers today tend to have dogs in them. At least in San Francisco.

Seriously? Is there some actual sane reason, ie protecting dog from scorching sun, or people are just bonkers?

On reddit's frontpage, the word choices people use for posting/commenting about pets is worthy of some sort of proper study.

They've started to co-opt words typically reserved for human children at a rate that is difficult to believe is some sort of bias on my part. It's bizarre. Pets are surrogate children.

Re: America’s urban rebirth is missing actual births

#400
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a suburb and was bored shitless. I had one friend that lived within walking distance, and everyone else was too far away to get to without a car, which meant that I didn't get to see my friends unless it was convenient for one of my two parents (who both held full-time jobs). Cycling anywhere outside of the local neighborhood was out of the question, since the roads connecting neighborhoods were full of…

I lived in that kind of place. I also had my one nearby friend. We would ride our bicycles more than 5 miles along US-44. It has 2 lanes each side for a total of 4 lanes, 2-foot shoulders, and traffic that often got to a decent highway speed. There could be snow on the shoulder. One of the older bridges was narrow, with only about a half-foot shoulder. We went anyway. We had similar woods. We went out there and built…

Same here. I don't get this trope where we're pretending that a car with a parental chauffeur is the only method of transportation. I roamed all over the place as a kid with my first bicycle. Shorter distances when I was very young (6-7) but up to dozens of miles as I got older. I was raised by a single parent who was often working, so there was no car available, but using this great miracle machine, I could still visit friends, explore nature, build forts, etc. Suburbia just means you need to ride your bike a little further to get to your friends' houses.
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