421–430 of 572 posts
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I'd say "a dozen or two" is a very high number. Enjoy and value your luck!
reminds me of this saying, in different variations, attributed to Aristotle: "He who has many friends has no friends".
> why don’t we do this? The fetishization of the nuclear family, of course, as well as the building and zoning codes that facilitate that fetishization. Zoning calls them "single family homes" but it doesn't call it "nuclear family homes" or anything like that. Single family homes are more about American individualism [0] and not wanting to share anything if you don't absolutely have to. That's why, outside of at mos…
Single family homes aren’t the problem, it’s lack of density and mixed-use. Ideally you have single family homes mixed in with condos and apartments, coffee shops, grocery stores, etc. and then you mix in various sizes and configurations so the wealthy CEO is walking their dog at the park and saying hello to the student living in a studio apartment, and they all say hi to the elderly couple sitting on the porch when…
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How? My eight year old daughter gets to roam free and has seven or eight different kids she plays with on a weekly basis. A few of them daily. We’re not worried about her getting carried off because the area is super safe. We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house. It’s also very diverse, her f…
No, American suburbs are good enough compared to American cities that are just filthy. Cities outside of US are just fine for raising children.
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I don’t think so. I’ve seen countless threads and front page articles about more bike-friendly, anti-car city development, as well as how suburban and rural cities requiring cars and more driving is definitely not a good thing. It’s very hard to find anyone coming to defense of the allure of smaller, more open developments with actual land between your neighbors. If you want to find rural or suburban folks, HN is not…
I'm into rural living myself. Spent enough time in cities & suburbs to appreciate wide open spaces without nosy neighbors & HOA rules. I also appreciate cars & the freedom they enable. Re: anti-car people, one thing that is not acknowledged about America is that America is very large & people like having their own land. Public transportation is not a feasible option for mountain communities, low population density ar…
Access to friends is probably the biggest reason I prefer dense urban environments. There’s something magical about being able to step out your door and be within a 10-20 minute walk of close friends or family. It invites casual get togethers like Saturday afternoon coffee or an after work drink. Living an hour or two apart kills these opportunities. I recall walking through Vienna one weeknight evening and being ama…
Or just live in a small town where all of your friends and needs are 5 minutes away. I see no point to overpopulated cities with remote work so prevalent nowadays. Cars aren't the problem, overpopulated cities are. I can walk my town end to end in 15 minutes, there's a coop, grocery store, hospital, entertainment, etc. You can drive to another town if you want, or drive and park anywhere without paying, or walk, or b…
Problem with cities isn't overpopulation, it's housing. People want to live there but there isn't enough accommodations, and there totally could be if zoning and infrastructure were properly prioritized.
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If anything, you are being too nice to US suburbs: It's perfectly possible to have towns that are much denser than any US suburb. My Spanish home town has about 100K inhabitants: You'd not call that a city anywhere in the US. And yet, It's basically a circle with a one mile radius: Yes, just one mile. In that situation, one can walk everywhere, and public transportation is limited to the elderly, people carrying heav…
In my Portuguese apartment block I have 2 restaurants, a cafe, a hairdresser, a phone shop and some other commercial I haven't quite identified. From the front door I can throw rocks at 2 more cafes, another restaurant, a launderette, a playground and a car dealer. There is a basket ball court out the back. Nothing special about my 7 storey block, but when a certain density is reached things start to work really well
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This is a bit of an unconventional POV, but I don't consider large areas of suburban sprawl to be cities but just really big towns. This covers Houston, swaths of Atlanta, lots of Southern California. There are lots of people living there compared to rural areas, to be sure, but without the density to support usable public transportation (once-an-hour buses don't count), it's really not a city at all. It's endless su…
I don't think it's that unconventional. I'm a published critic of American-style automobile sprawl, and I've argued that 90% of what notionally passes for a metro area in Middle America should be reclassified as a rural area in the eyes of most reasonable people from elsewhere in the world.
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This is why I love living in a city with a reliable train network. So many times I have left a party completely drunk late at night, and been perfectly able to manage my way back home. Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out.
> Seems like Americans are left with the choice to either risk killing someone/themselves driving home or just not going out. If only there was a service where you can pay money to be driven somewhere... I heard Americans invented these smartphones with apps, Maybe they can even invent an app-based version of that paid ride service!
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US anecdata: I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town b…
> Within the same walking distance Aye, but I bet GP's home town in Spain is much more pleasant to walk in from November to March ;-) That aside, there are some real gems among Western Mass towns! I wonder, with all the empty land in this country (even in places very hospitable to human life), if it's possible to found new towns built in the "European" model of a central plaza surrounded by multifamily, mixed-use dev…
I've been wondering how related these feelings of distance and isolation in the middle of society are to how the area is designed. I had always known for a long time the "why" I didn't want to go out on weekends and such, but it wasn't until I watched some of those videos from "Not Just Bikes" that it really, really struck me. I literally dread finding parking more than I enjoy finding friends. And suburban (and fran…
This is a bit of an unconventional POV, but I don't consider large areas of suburban sprawl to be cities but just really big towns. This covers Houston, swaths of Atlanta, lots of Southern California. There are lots of people living there compared to rural areas, to be sure, but without the density to support usable public transportation (once-an-hour buses don't count), it's really not a city at all. It's endless su…