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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

#481

Post by jimt1234 »

cbondurant wrote: post #296

I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let…

You hit on what I consider a paradox of parenting today: Kids have access to instant communication with their parents/guardians, yet they can't be left on their own in public because it's too dangerous. That never made sense to me. I've tried to convince parents that kids are actually safer today (primarily because of smart phones, but also because of Ring cameras on every damn house) than us Gen-Xers were, but no one buys it. I hear the same excuses: It's too risky these days. There's so many creeps out there. Have you seen the registered offender websites? And that's just the creeps we know about!

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

#482

Post by crooked-v »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #226
antiframe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, th…

> 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…

> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else

Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.

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

#483

Post by tonymet »

ineedasername wrote: post #472
tonymet wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so are means. Mean reported crime dropping in urban areas does not mean that things are adequately safe. having x% lower chance of getting mugged in the hood doesn’t mean that your kids can ride the bus alone. Urban areas in the 90s , in projects and ghettos were basically war zones in terms of murder rates. They pushed the average murder & violent crime rates off the charts. Those have come down, but that doesn’t me…

Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code. My hope i…

Let’s see how it goes. I don’t think safety is properly being measured. Much like you can’t measure a beautiful property or a delicious dish. It has to be experienced.

Moreover, AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.

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

#484

Post by petsfed »

eloisant wrote: post #371
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…

The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars. You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.

I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.

You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.

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

#485

Post by bluGill »

hansvm wrote: post #432
bluGill wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 10 houses per shop Broadly speaking, that sounds super low, and it also doesn't echo the business density I typically observe. I think even for lifestyle businesses you need hundreds of homes actively using your services, maybe thousands total. Suppose you really could live off just 10 houses; you'd need something like $2400/yr/person in revenue at 100% cash operating margins to turn it into a reasonable income (wh…

You are not running the same numbers I am. If there are 1000 houses I'm claiming there should be about 100 retail shops. That people only get a haircut every few months is why those can't spread out.

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

#486

Post by chrisgd »

slfnflctd wrote: post #320
cbondurant wrote: post #296

I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let…

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…

Perhaps those are your greatest memories because that is what you were doing as a child. Would your greatest memories of you grow up now be playing Minecraft online?

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

#487

Post by kjkjadksj »

contubernio wrote: post #136
doctoboggan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.

There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A ki…

Parts of Atlanta are certainly walkable today. Midtown or Buckhead would qualify.

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

#488

Post by buellerbueller »

breezybottom wrote: post #388
buellerbueller wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All urban living situations that are not NYC penthouses are slums?

Even in the nicest apartment I ever had, I still had to listen to my upstairs neighbor scream and beat up his wife.

sounds like a sample size/bias problem to me. maybe you're just drawn to slums?

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

#489

Post by buellerbueller »

mothballed wrote: post #386
buellerbueller wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs. i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.

People aren't statistical machine, they make judgements based on their life experiences. I've lived in at least half a dozen inner Midwest cities in the ghetto poor cores and I would describe the experience as basically "stay strapped or get clapped hellscape." People trying to rob me at gunpoint (yes happened), stealing my bikes and whatever they can find outside, testing you and sizing you up to see if you're a goo…

This story just doesn't add up.

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

#490

Post by nayuki »

Andrex wrote: post #288
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…

In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."

> lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent

This is impossible. Look at even the densest cities today such as Hong Kong, with many 50-storey buildings packed closely. HK as a whole has maybe 25% land area allocated for buildings and the rest is forest and green space.

Or consider Tokyo - sure, it is a big sprawling metropolis and pretty much an uninterrupted patch of concrete. But the urban area does eventually end, and much of the land area of Japan is mountains, forests, farms, etc.

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