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Why don’t more people live close to friends?

annehelen.substack.com

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Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#521

Post by coldtea »

0zemp1c wrote: post #398
jonny_eh wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lay off the Fox News

heh no, America was taught by Hollywood to be afraid of Baltimore (The Wire)

People used to live in a relatively much safer country (which makes for all of the western world, western europe, UK, Australia, Japan, etc.) should be afraid of most American cities - especially certain areas and hours.

It's just that Americans in those cities have learned to normalize this violence all around them. They're OK with abnormally large rates of homicide, burglary, theft, rape, and acompanying ill like school shootings, police killings...

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#524

Post by pg_1234 »

mcv wrote: post #318
hibikir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always struggle with the difference between a town and a city, because Dutch has only one word for them: stad. A stad (plural "steden" is something that in the middle ages had city rights (or is it town rights?), a dorp (village) does not. And this has lead Netherland to have some steden of only a few hundred inhabitants, while some villages have more than 100,000, which of course makes no sense. The place I grew u…

Traditionally the distinction was you had to have a cathedral to be a city.

... I suppose the modern equivalent is a CBD.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#525

Post by matchbox »

I completely agree to this. We moved to TX from MN for the sake of being closer to friends. Within months I can see my social life is improved, I bump into friends casually while picking up kids & walking in the community.

I read the Atomic Habits & Tiny Habits few years back and one thing I learned from there is to remove resistances from the habits that one would want to build. Distance is a resistance in building/maintaining relationships. If one want to build better relationships, reducing the physical distance between friends does help.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#526

Post by scarface74 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #468
scarface74 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who has kids and sometimes wants a break And then there is the lack of privacy. Your parents who came from a different generation trying to tell you how to live your life (ie my parents are very religiously conservative). I would have to deal with my mom and my wife walking on eggshells to not offend each other. I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn,…

> I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn That can't be the problem that comes to mind when dealing with a parent. I love my parents, but if that's the extent of your annoyance, you got off real real easy.

That’s an example of someone who doesn’t believe in “wasting money on things you can do yourself” and constantly judging our decisions?

Did I mention the whole religious conservative thing and how they would probably grit their teeth when my wife and I would just casually talk about going out to dinner with “her friend and his husband”?

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#527

Post by pb7 »

yawnr wrote: post #430
zamnos wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an extreme take but IMO New York is the only real American city. Maybe Boston and Chicago. Everything else is a glorified suburb. I wish we had good, small cities in this country, but we just don’t.

San Francisco?

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#528

Post by reducesuffering »

scarface74 wrote: post #526
reducesuffering wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have to deal with my dad wondering why I would waste money paying people to cut my lawn That can't be the problem that comes to mind when dealing with a parent. I love my parents, but if that's the extent of your annoyance, you got off real real easy.

That’s an example of someone who doesn’t believe in “wasting money on things you can do yourself” and constantly judging our decisions? Did I mention the whole religious conservative thing and how they would probably grit their teeth when my wife and I would just casually talk about going out to dinner with “her friend and his husband”?

Ok fair, I deal with the same thing. I just thought the example was a weak one, if it's only occasional, for why it's tough to be around your parents.

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#529

Post by bombcar »

jodrellblank wrote: post #279
bombcar wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k is certainly a city. That’s quite large - and for many places in the US the local “city” is of that size. People definitely call Ventura, CA “the city” and its 100k.

> 100k is certainly a city. In the UK “city” status is conferred by being on the government’s list of cities and isn’t automatic based on size or presence of a Cathedral or anything else. See: Tom Scott on YouTube “the town which forgot to be a city” - https://youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg

Some places in the US define what a city is, but it can be very small - Fourth class: Cities with 9,999 or fewer residents.

It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).

Re: Why don’t more people live close to friends?

#530

Post by actionablefiber »

slothtrop wrote: post #498
actionablefiber wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I spend $15 on drinks then Ubering to and from has just at least tripled my cost of going out. If going out with friends costs $20 a head instead of $45, more people will want to do it.

Even with trains, commute isn't free.

Yes, you can see I costed out a non-car round trip at $5. In NYC on the MTA it would be $5.50; in DC, between $4 and $8.

One thing I do in DC is ride bikeshare to the bar (where the amortized cost of the ride, with my annual membership, is basically $0) and then take metro back ($2).

And of course this is all moot if you can just walk, since it is always free, which is one major benefit of denser mixed use walkable neighborhoods.

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