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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

#541

Post by ankaz »

obscurette wrote: post #116
human305893 wrote: post #62

I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community. - When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings. - Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out - Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well - You did most of your shopping at the local shops,…

I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation…

[dead]

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

#542

Post by bombcar »

Xirdus wrote: post #282
skandinaff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.

There is huge value in being acquainted with computers at a young age, especially if they end up in STEM or some white collar job.

This was true but accidental when "we" were growing up, because if I wanted to play a game on the family computer, I had to figure out the right drivers and suchwith to make it work.

"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.

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

#543

Post by amanaplanacanal »

marcyb5st wrote: post #237
porphyra wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.

I think that most of western Europe is fucked in that sense. Previous generations piled up a ton of debt and so now there is no breathing room for subsidize affordable housing, parenting benefits, ... . Add to that that you need 2 salaries to live, that you must study until when you are 25+ to have a degree, that you don't want to have a baby just when you career is starting, that housing is extremely expensive, that…

Sounds very similar to what is happening in the US.

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

#544

Post by embedding-shape »

Amezarak wrote: post #529
embedding-shape wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So homeless people use bathrooms to do drugs and somehow that means there is a age limit? I'm sorry but this makes no sense, how are they at all related? Why would it matter what someone does before you use the bathroom, it's not like drugs stick around in the air and impact people entering the room afterwards...

The last time I was in a major city with my kids I went to a major, nice park. They had to use the bathroom. There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles. There is absolutely no reason to tolerate this in a civilized society, and it’s completely unheard of in the region I’m from, a major culture shock - along with th…

> There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.

What the hell? No offense, but was this in a slum somewhere or something? Not saying it doesn't happen in other places, but I think I've came across that once in my ~35 years, visiting countless of public bathrooms, cities and towns, admittedly mostly around in Europe, South America and Asia, but still...

I don't think that's a "city" thing, that might be very local to the specific city you visited, or the specific area.

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

#545

Post by bombcar »

macNchz wrote: post #505
oersted wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space. I get that it is low density, but not that low, and there is some money to spend in such areas. They would do good business.

There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission. In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that…

Even where it's allowed (which is more places than you think, look at zoning maps) and some places where it's not (variations exist) the places that do pop up usually die.

It takes serious dedication and time to turn a culture around, throwing in a few "desired third places" isn't going to cut it - at least not before the rents become too much to bear.

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

#546

Post by tonymet »

jimt1234 wrote: post #501
tonymet wrote: post #448

Facebook/Nextdoor has been a curse for kids. Parents gossip, moan and report kids constantly. Recently hysteria over e-bikes. But really it’s any trivial annoyance. I think adults / elderly completely lack perspective and compassion for kids. Berating them for using iPads, berating them for playing outside. In reality there aren’t that many kids out socializing, and not many avenues for them to be free and be themsel…

I'm a Gen-Xer. I work with a lot of younger, fresh-out-of-college kids. I tell them about how it was as a kid in the 70's and 80s, but they generally reject it with disbelief. They think I'm lying when I tell them that my single mother would leave for work in the morning, and us kids would have absolutely zero supervision until she got home, usually around 7PM. Contacting her at work was basically impossible ( "If yo…

I'm sure kids think Don't Tell Mom the Baby Sitter's Dead is preposterous, but our parents frequently left 6+ kids unsupervised for a week or more at a time. The oldest at home was 13

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

#547

Post by bombcar »

bluGill wrote: post #485
hansvm wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can run the numbers relatively exactly. 35% of income is spend on housing, which "disappears" (we can assume this will support some banks and realtors or whatnot), some is spent on this and that, and the remaining spent on "household, groceries, entertainment, etc" would be what can support retail shops. Then you just need to know how much it costs to run a shop, and you know how many houses you need to support it.

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

#548

Post by petsfed »

bombcar wrote: post #523
petsfed wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.

The funny thing about the big box stores is that they can apply so much pressure to their suppliers (and their landlords) that the price difference outstrips differences in quality and convenience.

Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon residents who are too cool for such a mainstream store. Despite the higher costs, I vastly preferred shopping at Market of Choice because I could easily walk there and the food was generally higher quality. Generically, I would consistently shop at stores I could bike or walk to, outside of that shopping center, and frequent restaurants I could get to.

Meanwhile, where I live now, there's a Haggen (an Albertson's branded Whole Foods competitor) across the street from a Safeway (which is the brand Albertson's uses in this particular market for their standard store). They carry identical store-brand items, but the premium store charges 5-10%, because they know that people will pay more just for a better shopping experience.

Obviously I don't speak for everybody, but I think a lot more people would accept paying a little bit more in exchange for not driving so much, but part of the problem is that, thanks to market effects and economies of scale and so on and so forth, they have to pay a lot more, for the same products.

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

#549

Post by throw0101c »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #527
throw0101c wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." […] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class f…

I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate. Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.

> I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate.

How does urbanism lock people out of owning real estate?

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

#550

Post by d1sxeyes »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #457
d1sxeyes wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Building more housing is indeed part of a possible solution, although it’s hard to convince folks whose mortgages are baselined on inflated prices not to oppose building more.

Realistically, I don't think most people think that way. ("Don't build that apartment! The resulting increase in the local supply of housing will decrease my property value.") It's more that they don't want to live next to whatever is being built or don't want the character of the neighborhood they live in to change. Which is somewhat understandable, but there's a balance here between the rights of existing residents…

I think you’re mostly right that people don’t think in those terms exactly, but “oh if they build more housing traffic will be a nightmare” or “it’s already hard enough to get into the good schools” or “I can’t even get a doctor’s appointment before you build a hundred new houses” and so on: not directly about cost, but I think they do think about all of the things that drive value (and therefore cost) in the existing housing stock.
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