The myth of revealed preference for suburbs • Hacker News Board

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#81

Post by reddog » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #12

Yet another article claiming that I, every member of my family, and all of my friends don’t actually want to live in our horrible susburbs. It’s not possible that we actually love it here, that we like the clean air, wide open spaces, huge yards, non-crowded downtown, small family friendly parades, and our rodeo. Nope, we’re all just lying to ourselves and really want to love in a cramped arcology.

Don't fight it. These people have studied architecture and city planning at the best schools. They know whats best for you is to live in a two bedroom apartment next to the train station. Once there you will start to understand how irrational your life decisions have been.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#82

Post by DanAndersen » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #73

imaoreo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

care to explain what those drawbacks are?

Let's see: Drunks/junkies/mentally ill people shitting, pissing, and vomiting everywhere, while verbally (and sometimes physically) abusing the passers-by. Noise. Breathing the stench of exhaust fumes, week-old garbage, and someone else's idea of cooking. Having no place for your children to sit on the grass without worrying about them finding someone's discarded needle or excrement. Having no space for gardens, hobb…

It's a shame you're being downvoted for expressing quite accurate downsides to city living. Issues like what you describe are why I will never live in SF and only begrudgingly live in any large city.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#83

Post by kazinator » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #73

imaoreo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

care to explain what those drawbacks are?

Let's see: Drunks/junkies/mentally ill people shitting, pissing, and vomiting everywhere, while verbally (and sometimes physically) abusing the passers-by. Noise. Breathing the stench of exhaust fumes, week-old garbage, and someone else's idea of cooking. Having no place for your children to sit on the grass without worrying about them finding someone's discarded needle or excrement. Having no space for gardens, hobb…

Why, you anti-density, hell-bent-on-destroying-the-earth scoundrel! :)

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#84

Post by LeifCarrotson » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

Isamu wrote: post #2

>If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. This article makes its point from the book "Zoned Out" (2005.) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the argument is that zoning policies make suburban sprawl, not free markets. They argue that if zoning restrictions were lifted and development responded to free market forces, higher density hous…

> represents a long tail of real preferences among the population

The other problem with this long tail is that (like other long tails of, say, bandwidth or storage utilization) it has a disproportionate effect on the whole. If 60% of, say, 100k people in a metropolitan area prefer to live in urban, high-density housing at 20,000 people per square mile, and 20% prefer to live in low-density suburbs at 4,000 people per square mile, you have 3 square miles of urban housing and 10 square miles of suburbs. And the small number of rural folks on the outskirts who are living the American dream of having their own 40 acres (160 houses per square mile) have an even larger effect on average land usage.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#85

Post by YokoZar » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:55 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #8

Isamu wrote: post #2

>If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. This article makes its point from the book "Zoned Out" (2005.) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the argument is that zoning policies make suburban sprawl, not free markets. They argue that if zoning restrictions were lifted and development responded to free market forces, higher density hous…

> But I think sprawl just represents a long tail of real preferences among the population. It may be relative price, it may be having a yard, it may be the suburban school districts, it can be all kinds of things. And yeah, if people had control, the suburbs wouldn't sprawl forever. It would be just their nice suburban neighborhood and everybody else could be jammed into the city. That's pretty much it. Everyone who…

This logic doesn't square with what we observe in voting patterns. When high rent cities go from majority homeowner to majority renter, the laws start to change to legalize more housing.

That doesn't mean renters didn't care for housing when they were a minority, it just means they were efficiently marginalized.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#86

Post by RandallBrown » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

DanAndersen wrote: post #82

Turing_Machine wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see: Drunks/junkies/mentally ill people shitting, pissing, and vomiting everywhere, while verbally (and sometimes physically) abusing the passers-by. Noise. Breathing the stench of exhaust fumes, week-old garbage, and someone else's idea of cooking. Having no place for your children to sit on the grass without worrying about them finding someone's discarded needle or excrement. Having no space for gardens, hobb…

It's a shame you're being downvoted for expressing quite accurate downsides to city living. Issues like what you describe are why I will never live in SF and only begrudgingly live in any large city.

It's not a surprise they're being downvoted because while their claims are technically accurate, they're pretty disingenuous.

I lived in an "urban" area and I didn't have bars on my windows. I'm sure the chance of me being mugged was higher than a suburb, but that's more a function of population than anything else. It's still low enough that it's a negligible risk for me and my girlfriend. While I've certainly seen discarded needles in big cities, I've never come across them on the lawn of major parks and actually tend to find them in the more suburban areas of cities. Most big cities have at least some schools that are very good, even if some of them are sub par.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#87

Post by neilwilson » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

Interesting to note that there is only two choices - city or commuter suburb with cars. The third choice is villages and towns where people live with their own front door onto the street and still walk to work. Move the work where the people are. Decentralise

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#88

Post by nradov » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #18

Steltek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Boston, everything is expensive so only the rich can afford them. Boston resident preferences might be explained by culture more than looking up through the glass ceiling of home prices. I think we might also be reaching a tipping point where school districts may not even hold people back. If you can afford a house anywhere, you probably also can afford to send your kids to private school.

You would expect that to be the case in the Bay Area, but even now people will spend several hundred thousand dollars more for a home in a good school district, even though that money could have been used to pay for private school.

Neighborhoods with good school districts also tend to have lower crime rates so that probably accounts for much of the difference.

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#89

Post by afpx » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 5:39 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #27

exelius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hold up Houston as the counterexample. It has zero zoning policies whatsoever and is one of the most sprawled cities in the country, and everyone lives in low-density single family ranch homes with huge floor plans and drives an hour to work each way. Developers still basically just plop large single-family residential developments on random plots of land with few ways to stop them. In the absence of zoning,…

I just did a cursory search, and houston has mandatory parking minimums. Those are one of the most sprawl policies you can find. It also mandates setbacks from the street, wide roads, and long blocks. Overall Houston does a lot of stuff right! But, I think they have still baked sprawl into their system. From what I can see, my dense Montreal neighbourbood would be illegal in Houston. (It's illegal almost everywhere i…

“Wait, why are we deregulating again? It didn’t even work the last time.”

“Oh ... well ... we just didn’t deregulate enough last time. Let’s just deregulate a little more, and we’ll see the results!”

Re: The myth of revealed preference for suburbs

#90

Post by yborg » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 5:48 AM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #18

Steltek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Boston, everything is expensive so only the rich can afford them. Boston resident preferences might be explained by culture more than looking up through the glass ceiling of home prices. I think we might also be reaching a tipping point where school districts may not even hold people back. If you can afford a house anywhere, you probably also can afford to send your kids to private school.

You would expect that to be the case in the Bay Area, but even now people will spend several hundred thousand dollars more for a home in a good school district, even though that money could have been used to pay for private school.

This is kind of backwards. Because of the way that education is funded in the US, expensive housing areas end up with good schools because they have the funding. And people live in these expensive areas because they have the means and desire to live in an area with others of their same social status, or and/or whose reputation confers status.