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Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

economist.com

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Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#301

Post by thehappypm »

embedder wrote: post #282
echelon wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development. Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems. Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people…

You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entire…

I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#302

Post by throwawayboise »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #221
scruple wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live. Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly . The stree…

I consider an area unwalkable once an intersection 5 or more lanes wide appears.

Downtown Copenhagen has many of those....

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#303

Post by kilotaras »

throwawayboise wrote: post #292
acdha wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans don’t like each-other. Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.

It's more than that. Jews, Asians (individually, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc), Italians, Polish, Irish, Arabic ... all segregated into their own neighborhoods. The "melting pot" was never really real. We are a nation of immigrants that never really got along with one another except when common interests were threatened. I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that di…

> all segregated into their own neighborhoods.

Check out Shellings model of segregation [0]. Global seggregation doesn't necessarily mean that local decisions have strong preference for their race.

e.g. for two types it's enough to have preference "I want at least 33% of my neighbours to be same type as me" to reach segregated global result.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segrega...

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#304

Post by robotburrito »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #263
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.

True, but the problem here in the US is that the places you can do this are so limited that the price to live that car free lifestyle is astronomical. You either pay 2,500+ a month in rent, have a house payment that is 5,000+ a month, or have to buy a car, move out to the country and shop at a dollar general.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#305

Post by dan-robertson »

tsunamifury wrote: post #252
ben-schaaf wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being. American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car…

You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other. We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t. We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, t…

I’m very unconvinced but this. New Yorkers famously all hate each other yet if you can afford to live in relatively central parts of New York, you don’t need a car. Though New York is still somewhat car-focused. Internationally, London has similar but a slightly milder case of car-dependent sprawl to New York (but people still famously don’t like each other). Swedes are also known for their desire for space and privacy yet they somehow manage to live in cities that don’t follow the North American model. And many Dutch cities used to be going in the direction of the American model (held back by the lower wealth after the war preventing mass car ownership) and only changed direction in the 70s after won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children political campaigning and some very slim majorities in votes on the topic. And the transition was a slow one too.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#306

Post by chucksmash »

tsunamifury wrote: post #224
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

> It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother.

The way American communities were laid out by previous generations was not caused by the recent political strife.

I'd say it has much more to do with available modes of transit when the place was settled than it does any national characteristic of incivility.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#307

Post by truffdog »

embedder wrote: post #296
echelon wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around. You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities. Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water suppl…

With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo... I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.

Single family sprawl is more cost efficient than dense development when you include regulatory compliance.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#308

Post by Seb-C »

luma wrote: post #261
mrkentutbabi wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t please everyone. That’s the whole point of diversity vs harmony. Besides, Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. Please think about this hard as lonng, philosophically. To answer your question. Yes we have a lot of single women, doing careers instead of doing families just fine.

> Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten. And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088…

> This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten.

What do you mean? No, it's not. With the exception of WW2, Japan has seen way less conflicts and very little wars in it's history compared to other countries.

As for your link, I cannot access the source, but your comment seems biased by the meaning of marriage in the first place.

Basically, in Japan getting married means starting a family. If you don't plan to have children, you usually don't get married. Because if you remove the cultural and sentimental value given to the act of being married in the west, there is not much practical advantage or benefit to it in the first place.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#309

Post by kiba »

thehappypm wrote: post #299
freshpots wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suburban land is cheaper to buy but far more expensive to service (water, electricity, roads, etc.) and maintain. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th... Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.

Is this really true though? Every infrastructure project in cities seems to cost billions of dollars (Boston’s Green Line Extension, New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway). It would take quite a lot of suburban road, gas, electric etc infrastructure to add up to anything close to that.

They cost billion of dollars but they are also supporting places that also pays a lot more taxes.

With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#310

Post by truffdog »

Wiseacre wrote: post #236
wrycoder wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“social support” is what caused the problem in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken they never received any kind of reparations, so they've been a permanent underclass since slavery.

He is referring to 20th century social services meant to fix slums, that wound up making marriage something that could get you kicked out of public housing and on-books work something that could get you kicked off financial support. This is often blamed for making everything worse and contributing to the social disaster zones that were the large public housing projects in northern cities.
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