The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream • Hacker News Board

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#171

Post by aniro » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 2:51 AM UTC

Crito wrote: post #92

aniro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. I find the original description absurdly accurate. I don't drive/have a car and it is crippling.

It depends on the suburb. I could see myself living in someplace like Manayunk without car, but I suppose that is sort of pushing the meaning of "suburb". Some of the towns along the Main Line seem fairly livable without a car (For a time I did the opposite, living in Philadelphia and working in Radnor), but that doesn't seem ideal. Some of the other towns along the Main Line are definitely as he describes.

I whole-heartedly agree that it is highly dependent upon the burb. Something as simple as a grocer and a hardware store in a town center can make a world of difference.

Transportation alternates are also highly variable and make a huge difference.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#172

Post by techsupporter » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:16 AM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #118

coryrc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you don't have kids and do work in downtown Seattle? And rarely visit Lake City or West Seattle or anywhere south of Seattle? Or anywhere requiring a transfer outside of commuting hours? Because those are all significantly (hours more) to take mass transit than to drive.

I live near Lake City - getting to Ballard is not under an hour by mass transit - it's something like 20 minutes by car. Very frustrating! I hope the new light rail will create more E-W bus routes.

Where do you live that Ballard is an hour away from Lake City? I live at 125th/Lake City Way and the 41 to the 40 at Northgate is 40 minutes. If you really want to take an hour, you could get on the 65 and ride where it turns into the 32 to go to south Ballard via Fremont. Though I do agree, I really hope the station gets properly built at 130th so that hours from the 41 (and maybe even 522) can be diverted to a bus that goes from Fred Meyer west to connect to RapidRide D.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#173

Post by enjo » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:48 AM UTC

avn2109 wrote: post #46

enjo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crime rates and school rankings are the two places where the general populations inability to understand statistics really come home to roost.

Intuitively this seems right, but I wouldn't mind hearing more about what exactly the general populace is misunderstanding there.

The biggest thing with crime rates is understanding relative risk. The crime rate in another neighborhood may be 40% higher than yours, but that by itself is relatively meaningless. The reality is that in the vast majority of places in the United States you are very unlikely to be the victim of the crime. Even if you stay in a particular neighborhood for decades.

I've never been able to ascertain wether the insistence that suburbs are much safer comes from not understanding the actual risk, or something more sinister (racism - probably unintentional).

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#174

Post by enjo » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #168

aaron-lebo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a child of the suburbs and have since moved to the city so take this with a grain of salt. I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared…

"I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available" I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.

This really shows up in food. I always cringe when my suburban friends just rave over the meal they had at Maggiano's. There is just so much more in the world to discover outside the comfortable safe world of chain restaurants.

That probably sums up the whole suburban experience to me. Comfortable, safe, predictable, beige. As someone who craves adventure (fwiw, I'm edging closer to 40) I just crave the authenticity a city or even a great small town provides. Suburbs really are just a bad compromise between those two things, the worst of all possible worlds.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#175

Post by techsupporter » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #140

3pt14159 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define walking distance. If you're talking about more than 15 or 20 minutes I think we have different definitions. Most people cannot get more than a grocery store from a walk away if they live in a suburb.

5-10 minutes. It's an easy walk. Maybe...2 or 3 long blocks in NYC. I realize of course that I got "lucky" and live in a really especially great suburb. However, I've noticed most of the developments in my area tend to be similar. A central "town center/shopping mall" surrounded by condos and apartments, surrounded by townhouses, surrounded by single family homes.

And that's nice and maybe I'd actually like to live there, but here's another question: How are these 'burbs linked to the outside world? As an example, your description sounds a lot like Issaquah Highlands east of Seattle. Shopping, light commercial, and so on surrounded by individual houses. The problem is, how do those people get to and from work? Massive freeways? Issaquah Highlands is asking to be included on the far end of a big light rail project and it will cost a few hundred million bucks to include them. It's still sprawl, just slightly-more-dense sprawl.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#176

Post by jarek » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 9:32 AM UTC

personZ wrote: post #74

ufmace wrote: post #9

My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households. Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a c…

As madoc mentioned, sure the strawman you've constructed is a terrible thing. But most suburbs are entirely unlike that. Most aren't gated. Only in very wealthy areas are lawns "huge", and most are minutes with an electric mower. There are sidewalks, and indeed most modern suburbs intermix commercial space such that, at my old suburban house, a giant grocery store was a five minute walk. And where does this "discoura…

Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now. Why does 90+% of working population still congregate together in offices? Why does YCombinator insist on having everyone in one geographical area and meeting in person often?

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#177

Post by thix0tr0pic » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 10:18 AM UTC

meddlepal wrote: post #104

School-Cotton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? I live in Ballard, a pretty damn residential neighborhood of Seattle, which is only a medium-density city. I live perfectly comfortably without a car. I have heard of people living comfortably without a car in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and I'm sure others that I'm forgetting. I even did so myself in Tucson for a year, though I'll grant that that was pretty annoying.

Car free in Boston for over 3 years now.

I also lived in Boston for 5 years without a car.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#178

Post by extra88 » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 12:15 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #115

binarymax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I differentiate in my brain, because I'm an 80's kid: I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs. I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs. I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.

I think I'm too young to understand your references. What's the difference between those types of suburbs?

One difference is vastly more wealth. The Scissorhands suburb was a classic "Levittown" suburb in non-classic colors: relatively small & inexpensive single-story homes that are virtually identical, each home has a lawn in the front and back but not a lot of space on the sides, not a lot of trees or even shrubbery because it's a development built in a relatively short period of time on what used to be farmland.

Bueller's suburb is decades older, much closer to the "urban" it's a "sub" of, Chicago, which grew over time. Much bigger houses, all two-story, with bigger plots of land and plenty of trees providing shade and privacy. The houses are more varied because they were built over a longer span of time by different people.

Both had sidewalks but there are ones like the Scissorhands suburb that don't.

Neither has much economic or ethnic diversity. Because it developed over time, Bueller's suburb may have more integrated retail and services while Scissorhands' is strictly a bedroom community.

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#179

Post by dllthomas » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:02 PM UTC

enjo wrote: post #174

dllthomas wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available" I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.

This really shows up in food. I always cringe when my suburban friends just rave over the meal they had at Maggiano's. There is just so much more in the world to discover outside the comfortable safe world of chain restaurants. That probably sums up the whole suburban experience to me. Comfortable, safe, predictable, beige. As someone who craves adventure (fwiw, I'm edging closer to 40) I just crave the authenticity…

This depends a little on the area and culture. Certainly there's always less variety in a suburb, but there's sometimes good quality and interesting things, there's just not the variety.

Or maybe the places I'm thinking of are "great small towns"? What would you call Pleasanton? (I think it's pretty clearly a suburb, and not terribly much more, though certainly it didn't start out that way...).

Re: The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

#180

Post by personZ » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 1:38 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #176

personZ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As madoc mentioned, sure the strawman you've constructed is a terrible thing. But most suburbs are entirely unlike that. Most aren't gated. Only in very wealthy areas are lawns "huge", and most are minutes with an electric mower. There are sidewalks, and indeed most modern suburbs intermix commercial space such that, at my old suburban house, a giant grocery store was a five minute walk. And where does this "discoura…

Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now. Why does 90+% of working population still congregate together in offices? Why does YCombinator insist on having everyone in one geographical area and meeting in person often?

Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now.

The "people tried before" argument is never convincing. Enormous industry changes have occurred (for instance my home has a rock-solid, 100% reliable, 100/10Mbps internet connection, which is better than many whole office buildings had a few years ago), and work at home practices have been exploding.

I once was a unique butterfly. Now I can name dozens of people who operate just like I do.

As to YCombinator -- I don't know. I am not a startup under the tutelage of Paul Graham. I don't particularly care or need to heed what his opinions on work practices are.