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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

stevemagness.substack.com

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Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#591

Post by Defletter »

strken wrote: post #513
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering…

Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains). Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and t…

Sorry, different person here, why does "sleeping at a train station" imply "setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway" or anything of the sort?

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#592

Post by [deleted] »

mothballed wrote: post #367
slfnflctd wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period. Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied arr…

I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property. Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed…

[deleted]

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#594

Post by gligorot »

orphea wrote: post #199
gligorot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why. I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept…

Is it hard to imagine that younger generation wants to live better lives? They don't want to suffer like their parents did. They are already fed up with all the bullshit that the current generation of politicians leaves to them to figure out? What is this argument, "too much comfort, too posh"?!

What’s the alternative? I personally don’t want to not have kids, whatever the cost.

I understand the position of others and it’s logically valid, but for me it’s a line I’m not willing to cross - for beliefs, personal reasons etc.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#595

Post by gligorot »

torben-friis wrote: post #312
gligorot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why. I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept…

It's not just a matter of comfort. If you have no housing, you have a monthly recurrent payment to make, where failing once makes you homeless. Will you be able to afford it next year? Next decade? After retirement? Removing that permanent threat of ruin is then the priority. It has to be solved before children because once you have them, that's a an extra economic burden and you won't make it out with that extra wei…

Yep my idea was that the grandparents have a house (paid off, no cost etc) and the others live there.

Regarding your other arguments, the Balkan cities are a bit unique in the sense that we have Roma people living in close proximity. And to see how they live without a single care is eye opening. To say favela is a compliment, they live in shacks, don’t have stable work, live day to day… yet have 3+ children each.

Not without issues of course, but it’s a stark reminder that while far from ideal, they still have kids. Their (and the kids’) quality of life is terrible, it’s not an issue to procreate.

Long topic for here, but if you’re interested check out a movie called “Gypsy Magic”, it shows their life and their daily trickery to survive (not a documentary).

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#596

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

anon291 wrote: post #577
andai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;) But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop. Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline. But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doi…

I have four kids, my neighbor has one, and I see this dynamic play out in real time. My neighbors are neurotic with their kid. Poor kid is hovered over. My kids play by themselves, walk to their grandmother's house (a block away), go to the park, and just kind of show up in our house from time to time. Of course the little ones are taken care of explicitly, but they too will age out of that. It's much better for ever…

> walk to their grandmother's house (a block away)

Do your neighbors have parents nearby? I think this makes an enormous difference.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#597

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

zwischenzug wrote: post #360

I don't believe people keep their kids 'safer' because they think the world has become more dangerous. It's slightly taboo, but I think people protect their kids more now because they are more precious to the parents. The average number of children per mother has plunged in the last 200 years, and investment required in them per child to get them to child-bearing capability is much higher also. Child mortality has dr…

There's probably some truth to this but it's hard to reconcile with the large number of parents who allow their kids to engage in behaviours known to be actively damaging and harmful at home.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#598

Post by prawn »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #105
prawn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined. When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was goo…

Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there…

Definitely far fewer kids living in that street - almost never see any. Possibly some adult kids still at home, but I would've guessed that on the whole there are fewer people living on that street. I'd say it's people parking their second or third cars off the property because their garage is used for other storage.

Easier to park on the street and theft risk has been negligible.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#599

Post by AnthonyMouse »

api wrote: post #310
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities. And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere…

I like to put it this way: The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets. I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent This is really what led me to stop being…

> It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."

Suburbs not only aren't required for this, requiring them to be suburbs actually makes it worse.

Suppose you have 1000 parcels of land and you need 3000 housing units. Obviously you need an average of three units per parcel. If 950 of the parcels are zoned to allow only one unit, the remaining 50 parcels then need to have an average of 41 units each.

Those parcels then become dramatically more expensive because they're the only place additional units can be added. Rents then have to rise to reflect the higher costs. Worse, some of those parcels already have e.g. 30 units but the cost of demolishing a perfectly good 30-unit building to build a slightly larger one is prohibitive, so now there is a shortfall and even the one-unit-per-parcel land ends up with higher rents.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#600

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bluGill wrote: post #321
oersted wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure that they could better maximize their returns by making room for local businesses and increasing the appeal of the area. And who says that a house will be worth more than a shop? It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.

You need about 10 houses per shop (anyone with better numbers? this works for discussion but it is likely wrong). However everybody needs many different shops and so it isn't a case of 10 houses 1 shop - since you always need to go elsewhere anyway wouldn't even think of the local shop when it would do and so they fail. Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of n…

> However everybody needs many different shops

That doesn't matter to any given one because they rarely need multiple types at the same time, so they just go to the nearest one of whatever they currently need. If you could build them in the suburbs then for many people in the suburbs, that would be the nearest one and it would get enough business to be sustainable. While reducing traffic because now some subset of the customers can walk to it instead of 100% of them needing to drive.

> Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.

Isn't that mainly because of zoning? The area with all the shops is the area where shops are allowed, or the area where something that pays higher prices for space than shops isn't.

> All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!

You should be able to have the shop and a housing unit or three on the same piece of land, which not only allows you to make more valuable use of the land, it also puts more people (i.e. customers) near the shop.

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