61–70 of 75 posts
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No doubt true, but surprising. I'd rather bag groceries somewhere else than be a programmer in Boston or DC.
Being a programmer in NYC, I love it and wouldn't trade living anywhere else at the moment. I guess to each their own.
An individual with the choice of living in the city or in suburbia is faced with a conundrum. Although you would think that by living in the city the individual will save money by expending significantly less natural resources and dramatically lowering his carbon footprint, it ironically costs him less money to do the exact opposite by living in the suburbs. This is because if the individual chooses to live in the ci…
Only short-term. Once you factor in gas, ownership of multiple cars, etc it's cheaper to live in the city. Doubly so if your time isn't worthless (time sitting in traffic is working for free)
However if living space isn't as a big of an issue, there is definitely a sweet spot where you can find smaller spaces that make living in the city cheaper then suburban life.
I kinda have mixed feelings about it (and I plan to move out even further, since my job allows remoting.) The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans. So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise…
Once it's built out, a portion of society is forced to dedicate their careers and extract public funding just to maintain the existing status quo of the infrastructure. Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving ar…
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I hate to be the one to break this to you, but SF isn't the only city in the US.
It's one of the few with passable public transportation, and the in the others with passable public transportation (e.g. NYC, DC, Boston), many people who could afford to drive take public transportation.
This particular story is about surburban sprawl, which means that anything happening in SF, NYC, DC, or Boston is completely irrelevant.
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I hate to be the one to break this to you, but SF isn't the only city in the US.
It's one of the few with passable public transportation, and the in the others with passable public transportation (e.g. NYC, DC, Boston), many people who could afford to drive take public transportation.
I kinda have mixed feelings about it (and I plan to move out even further, since my job allows remoting.) The thing is, money "lost" are spend on wages for people building roads, infrastructure, houses, etc. And this type of work more often done by local workforce, not some international company with bank accounts in caymans. So... how exactly money are "lost"? Lost by whom exactly? People found jobs, which otherwise…
Your view is the broken window fallacy. [1] All the man-hours and natural resources spent building all those roads and paying for all that gas to move around on them could have instead gone to expanding production. For instance, funding new companies, scientific research, and so on. That is the point of the article. Of course, the article is fallacious in that expanding production is not inherently better than consum…
Like with everything, there must be a balance (we need scientific research,) but having suburbia and infrasture is not automatically bad in my opinion.
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I suspect that most families living in a half million dollar McMansions actually do pay far more in tax than the typical apartment dweller. In my area, the flow of capital is definitely the opposite of what you describe: without question, the individuals living in the suburbs heavily subsidize the lives of those living in the more urban areas and apartments, at least those who live in a tax district that has a combin…
This dilemma is solved (at least in some states) with townships and neighborhoods seceding from the major city and incorporating their own. This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.
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People who can afford to do so usually avoid public transportation. Instead of posting a new edition of the same self-righteous HN thread bewailing other peoples' choices practically every single day of the week, it might be interesting to examine the apparent dissonance between the way amateur urban planners think things should work, and the way they actually do.
> People who can afford to do so usually avoid public transportation. There are a number of factors at play here. To pretend that just because people act a certain way that the decision is based in fact and logic ignores reality. People don't use public transit because: 1. They don't want to mingle with the "lower classes." 2. Driving a car for a long time was a status symbol. It's less of a status symbol today, but…
Which is my whole point: we should find out what the actual basis for their decision is, and take it into consideration.
But it's much more fun to adopt an air of superiority on HN as you settle into your comfy seat on the bus to the Facebook campus, where your worst immediate problem is that your attractive and personable seatmate has spilled a bit of his latte on your armrest. This is not most peoples' lives, but you'd never know it from reading all of the "B... b... but SF!" comments in these threads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once it's built out, a portion of society is forced to dedicate their careers and extract public funding just to maintain the existing status quo of the infrastructure. Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving ar…
What exactly you would expect city budget to be spent on, if city would eliminate needs for supporting infrastructure? Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
> Also, why having more infrastructure is automatically bad?
Don't think it's that absolute.
Think about tax dollars collected from a given square mile vs tax dollars spent on a given square mile. Suburbs tend to decrease the former and increase the latter, high-density projects tend to move the money in the opposite direction.
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This dilemma is solved (at least in some states) with townships and neighborhoods seceding from the major city and incorporating their own. This way "most families living in a half million dollar McMansions" get their own road-heavy city budget, and a "typical apartment dweller" gets his parks/libraries/schools/transportation fix.
This is exactly what has been done in my area. It has unquestionably benefited those living in the 'burbs moreso than those that live closer to the urban center. The major motivation for it was schools, though. That's actually why everybody in this area moved out of the official city limits in the first place, and it's what keeps those who can't afford private schools from moving back now.
That's a grand theory, of course. In reality, outside of a few cities, most American urban downtowns are proverbial dumps.