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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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What we talk about when we talk about suburbs

Let's get the BS out of the way first.

First, the obvious one: In the last few decades, suburban growth hasn't been caused by racism. As a matter of fact, blacks and immigrants are moving to the suburbs at a faster rate than whites. Meanwhile, whites have moved into the cities.

Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.

What about "fifteen minute cities?". I live in one, it's called a suburb. I can get to everything we need on a regular basis (groceries, parks, schools, kid's activities, a decent restaurant) in fifteen minutes. This is only possible with point-to-point, immediate-availability transportation. Mass transit simply doesn't work for this, as at-grade transit (busses, streetcars) are slower than bikes due to the number of stops, and grade-separated transit stations are so large and sparse that it's usually fifteen minutes just to get from the front door to the platform, plus half a headway.

If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.

We have community in the suburbs. The great American self-organizing spirit is a live here. No matter what you're into (or your kids are into), there's some knitting club, drum club, or bike club. Even better, our city parks and rec centers are actually usable, and the staff and patrons are clean and pleasant.

Real problems with the suburbs

This doesn't mean we don't have real problems with the suburbs. We do, especially from a few decades ago. In a uniquely American fashion, the Garden City Movement mutated into ever-larger lawns, ever larger medians, and ever larger streets. This, plus Euclidean zoning, does mean that the only way you can get around is the car. While it's great to have the car as the primary method of family transportation, having it as the only means of transportation does constrain older kids.

There is a pointless bigness to much of our environment. The standard American family combination of a big truck for dad and big crossover for mom would probably be improved by exchanging them for a HiLux and a Golf. We insist on building houses with formal living and dining rooms that we never use, paired with the "breakfast nook" and "family room" that we actually use. And of course yards, but I repeat myself.

Suburbs in the 80s were also less pleasant. There weren't many good restaurants, and if you didn't want something from a chain store or an understocked, overpriced mom-and-pop, you were out of luck. If you wanted a specialized job, you were in for a brutal commute into the city. Amazon and work-from-home have fundamentally changed that. We don't have to be near "stuff" anymore, it all comes to us.

Real solutions from the suburbs

Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.

If you're not in the family stage of life, the town center also has a four-over-one mid-rise that's pretty nice.

We have all the human-scale upside of a streetcar suburb, and all the modern benefits of suburbia (close to 3k sq ft, a real two car garage, modern appliances). We even have ethnic diversity (upscale immigrants) and a low carbon footprint (modern insulation, and I have a place to charge my Tesla)

Surprisingly, people who complain about the suburbs never say that we should all move to a master-planned New Urbanist suburb.

I love it, I would recommend it to anyone, and I'm leaving.

What we're really talking about when we talk about suburbs

I'm moving to an 80s suburb, with all the problems I just described. It has a pointless bench on a lawn built in a roundabout. Every week I see someone mowing that stupid patch of grass. You can't walk anywhere.

I'm moving from my semi-New Urbanist paradise to this terribly-designed 80s suburb for the same reason that some people live in Minneapolis instead of San Diego. San Diego has better weather, beaches, hot girls in bikinis, and you'll never shovel snow again, but if your family lives in Minneapolis, you live in Minneapolis, you shovel snow, and you ride your polar bear to work. If I grew up in Manhattan, NY, I would want to live there - and if I lived in Manhattan, KS, I would want to live there too.

I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.

We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.

That's also what people are really talking about when they complain about suburbs. They complain that suburbs are isolating and atomizing, which is obviously not true if you have family there.

What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. The suburbs are associated with the middle class, and if you're a social climber, you have to denounce the suburbs. A century ago, when industrial working class families lived in urban flats and townhomes, the social climbers made a point of talking about how they escaped the city.

When us proles couldn't afford cars, the social climbers flaunted their cars. Now that us proles can afford cars but can't afford Manhattan, the social climbers disdain cars and flaunt their apartments.

A century from now, if a shingle-sided split-level becomes expensive, you'll see disaffected young social climbers sneer that the 70s suburb is the pinnacle of human organization, unlike whatever form of housing the proles of that day live in.

Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.

We used to call these 'small towns', and they used to be a central part of the identity of a portion of the American populace. Looks like they're being reinvented with a new name.

I do not foresee a Jason Aldean tune titled, "try that in a new urbanist suburb", but we'll see.

If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.

It's like saying that Pandas & superior to Orcas because because they do well in Chinese captivity. Well, the entire Chinese captivity system was an unnatural system created to facilitate the conservation of Pandas. If you are going to compare to animals, then maybe evaluate them outside of a system hand-crafted to benefit one of them.

Why would someone want to solve suburban problems in a city. A city should not have suburban problems at all, emphasis on 'should'.

American suburbs appear great, because honestly, American cities are forced to suck. Even the best ones : 'NYC and Boston' have to be the unrivalled centers of the world to rise above the quicksand that is the American system. Other cities, are straight up terrible. Cities should have city advantages. If the streets are unsafe despite sufficient density and transit, then nothing is going to convince parents to let their kids be independent. If residential and commercial areas are zoned far away from each other, then you can't ever grab groceries 'fresh on the way back'.

What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.

Yes-ish. Suburbs are perceived to be higher status because it allowed people to have big families, better schools & lower crime. But, what about suburbs enables any of those 3 things ?

Safety : There is safety in numbers and it hard to commit to the most common crime (car crashes) if you aren't interacting with cars as much. NYC has a lower homicide rate than the median American suburb. American cities are only unsafe because American city police does not enforce crime the same way suburban police would.

Schools : Wealthy places have better schools. When cities are able to self-select for wealthy people like suburbs (Somerville, Newton, Brookline), they have great schools. If anything, cities have access to the best talent and should have better schools as a result. Boston Latin, Stuy High and Bronx Science are 3 of the best schools in the country and they're all in big cities despite much lower property taxes.

Big families : This one is tricky. In an era when most people won't be having more than 2 kids, I can't see why a house needs to be bigger than a 4 bedroom apartment. If anything, a safe city allows your kids to be independent and therefore allows the parents to have more kids without a proportional increase in required work. It is also much easier to setup babysitting when your kids can hang out in a large apartment lounge area or a neighbors house in the same building.

And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.

I can imagine a world where American cities are ruled like Singapore, and in such a world there is dramatically more appeal to moving into a city than exists for me now. I would love to think that I feel cities are safe enough and clean enough that I would actually like to be in them much more frequently. But, even if that were the case, I just don't have any problems living in my cute little suburb that moving to a city would solve. My commute is 20 minutes each way and the traffic isn't bad at all. My neighborhood is friendly, and there are kids who ride there around the cul-de-sac and play basketball in their driveways. I'm right by a bunch of nature trails, so I can run my measly ten miles/week somewhere with birds, squirrels, the sound of running water, and the occasional snake. And sure, I take a three minute drive to get to the entrance. Sure, I need a car, but I don't mind owning a vehicle. I enjoy the freedom of being able to on long roadtrips or little weekend getaways with my wife at the drop of a hat. I like that I can visit neighboring cities including the little town where I went to college to catch a football game.

None of this is to say that dense cities are bad or that I hate them, I definitely don't. But, I just don't know what problem I supposedly have that the obsessive city-posters think they are trying to solve for me. There's no problem. Suburbs are great. I live in one and my life is great. My friends all live in them and their lives are great. Even if American cities were cleaned up and the guy who shits on public transportation got a bullet and a shallow hole instead of free drugs and a hotel room, it wouldn't make me want to leave.

You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads.

I grew up in suburbs and walked to elementary schools and biked to middle school and high school. I was driven to school a single digit number of times K through 12.

Same response to any claim about suburban kids lacking independence. I had a bicycle, my mom wasn't driving me around. I was so self actualized as a suburban kid.

The last three suburban homes I've lived in were an easy walk from grocery stores with bakeries. I'm baffled by the alleged lack of fresh bread availability. I go to Costco, but I don't exclusively go to Costco. I went for a walk with my son last night and he said he wanted to go to the grocery store but I didn't have my wallet on me.

Even in Dallas I remember biking/walking to 7-11 to get a slurpee as a kid. In Fort Worth I regularly walk to the grocery store in good weather, or sometimes to the donut shop or whatever. These were standard suburban sprawl, not particularly walkable neighborhoods. ‘Kids can’t go anywhere without being driven’ is at least as much about parental neuroticism as it is about urban design. Yes there’s a feedback loop, but if Americans were less lazy and neurotic they’d walk/bike to places, and making the neighborhood more suited to walking won’t make them stop being lazy and neurotic unless you just make it impossible to use a car.

How long are / were the distances to closest stores and such?

As a kid? A mile or two to 7-11. I could and did walk in 20 minutes or so; no one else did because they were lazy or had neurotic parents(it involved crossing a busy street). Heck I remember as a younger child walking- with an adult- across the literal busiest non-highway in Dallas to go to the library(a mile ish, I guess). The fact that I was able to do this with my grandparents when they were in their late sixties and early seventies indicates that it's generally doable, but most people just don't want to.

Nowadays closer, but with more busy street crossings. I do see people walking or biking more often in my current neighborhood, but I live in a much poorer area than I grew up in- class differences might be a major factor both because gas is expensive and because poor people let their kids walk to QT or the donut shop or whatever on their own if they want something(to be clear, I'm an adult, but see lots of tweens/early teens walking off to things in my not-particularly-walkable neighborhood).

Can you share the general region you grew up in ? Super interested. I am trying to build my own list of good neighborhoods in the US.

Various west coast towns.

Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.

As I said, I live in a townhouse in the suburbs. My kids could walk to elementary school. We walk to ice cream, groceries, and a couple restaurants. I can get on my onewheel and get a loaf of fresh bread in about fifteen minutes.

Even with that, we still go to Costco. Anything that's shelf-stable or frozen gets bought in a single monthly Costco run. The time and money saved is enormous.

Once your kids get into semi-specialized sports or activities, you're going to drive. If one kid is into fencing and the other is into rock climbing, and next year it's hip hop dance and jiujitsu, there are only two solutions. Either you drive them everywhere, or you live at Tokyo density and the bus comes every five minutes.

And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.

Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.

Once your kids get into semi-specialized sports or activities, you're going to drive. If one kid is into fencing and the other is into rock climbing, and next year it's hip hop dance and jiujitsu, there are only two solutions. Either you drive them everywhere, or you live at Tokyo density and the bus comes every five minutes.

It's special genre of comedy for me personally to see Americans on this site with severe lack of knowledge about how things can be different from their own "exceptional way of doing things." In my noname 200k Russian town I could go to all these activities by myself at age 6. Bus or in my case "marshrutka" can arrive every 5 minutes without even remotely Tokio level of density, more accurately seven times smaller than it.

I understand that it's your own favorite way of life and you're trying to defend it but the problem is that it's forced on everyone. And generally we can see worldwide tendency of people wanting to live in big cities where all the job opportunities and interesting things are. Urbanists hate car-centric policies because they are artificially stifling this trend not because they want to force people like you out of suburbs. Europe has suburbs, they are an option there.

In my noname 200k Russian town I could go to all these activities by myself at age 6. Bus or in my case "marshrutka" can arrive every 5 minutes without even remotely Tokio level of density, more accurately seven times smaller than it.

Five minute headway is actually pretty rare for a town of 200k, even in Europe. It's usually 30 minutes, 20 if you're lucky, on trunk routes.

I understand that it's your own favorite way of life and you're trying to defend it but the problem is that it's forced on everyone. And generally we can see worldwide tendency of people wanting to live in big cities where all the job opportunities and interesting things are. Urbanists hate car-centric policies because they are artificially stifling this trend not because they want to force people like you out of suburbs. Europe has suburbs, they are an option there.

It's not my favorite way of life. I love how Tokyo has the infrastructure and culture that allows ten year old kids to have the freedom of the city.

Given the constraints I have, it's a good way of life though. You don't see people like me telling New York to raze their skyscrapers and put in what I want, but you see plenty of Blue Tribers mocking my way of life and trying to ban it.

Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.

Why not both. Nothing stopping family, friend and jobs from being in a city.

single monthly Costco run

I was being unfair. Costco is amazing. But a single monthly run vs Costco being your only weekly / twice-a-week grocery store are very different things. A monthly costco trip is a perfect SUV rental / 1 car household use-case.

I live in a townhouse in the suburbs. My kids could walk to elementary school. We walk to ice cream, groceries, and a couple restaurants. I can get on my onewheel and get a loaf of fresh bread in about fifteen minutes.

Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.

I was being unfair. Costco is amazing. But a single monthly run vs Costco being your only weekly / twice-a-week grocery store are very different things. A monthly costco trip is a perfect SUV rental / 1 car household use-case.

Why one car? This is 'murica! I have a two car garage. Tesla for the daily, Tacoma for Costco/Home Depot/bulky kids sports/camping trips.

Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.

start here for places like this. They're going up everywhere though. Five-over-ones in a town center for the singles, townhouses for the childless couples (I think they're perfect for small families), and then an outlying spread of relatively tall houses/small yards for bigger families.

I'd recommend them in a vacuum the same way I would recommend San Diego. In reality, it's where your friends and family are that matters.

I was being unfair. Costco is amazing.

Well, it's amazing for now. I was trying to fact-check your "no fresh bread" claim, which sounded like nonsense to me, and it took me down a whole rabbit hole of vague stories about conflicts between different Costco executives concocting and different Costco branches taking different policies. It looks like several years ago they par-baked every loaf and just finished up the baking at local stores (and they still use parbaked or frozen deliveries with a bunch of baked goods, while they've always fresh baked others), but today it seems like you might end up with fresh hand-rolled loaves at one store or fresh but machine-prepped loaves at another or par-baked loaves again at a third, and who knows what the policy will be next year.

Man, you learn something new everything. Who could've thought that 'fresh bread at Costco' had such a story behind it.

On the schools: urban districts in my experience have economies of scale going for them, and are able to have more magnet schools and AP coursework available. Some (many, even) urban schools rank poorly academically compared to the suburbs, but their special programs can easily outperform smaller districts.

When someone tells me they are moving to the suburbs for better schools, I believe them: it's probably true for average students, but that isn't true of the schools you enumerated.

Suburban or city center alike: you can cherry pick a great set of local schools so long as you can afford the correct neighborhood. Or go private or other non-standard public.

Also critically review GreatSchool criteria for each school. When you see an "x out of 10" ratiing for school quality it is usually the GreatSchool rating. They dock schools for lack of racial equity, etc. Their criteria is not the one I would use.

The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.

You're substantially overestimating the appeal of New York City to the modal American. New York City is now only 30% white and the number continues to decline. New York is appealing to rich PMCs that can skip the misery of its high density and tolerate the living costs. It's fine for third-worlders that are accustomed to living in garbage-strewn, densely packed poverty. The modal American prefers living in a normal town, whether it's a suburb, town, or small city.

The demographic of the city are interesting. NYC is roughly 31% non-Hispanic white (in 2010 it was 33% and in 2000 it was 35%), numbers are pretty stable in absolute terms over time. By contrast, the black population of NYC has fallen substantially from 30% of the population in the late 1980s to about 20% today, despite significant immigration from Africa and the Caribbean. Boston actually has a higher percentage of black residents than NYC now.

Most NYC inner suburbs and working / middle class neighborhoods really aren’t squalid by the standards of the median white American of the classes. I think this is a weird combination of a social memory of Taxi Driver 1970s NYC and an even older popular memory of cramped, awful Lower East Side tenements in the days of Ellis Island immigrants as popularized in a lot of historical movies and shows. In reality the neighborhoods in the outer boroughs in which ordinary teachers, cops, criminal defense lawyers, contraction supervisors, small business owners and so on live certainly have smaller house sizes than the US average but are not particularly dirty, nasty or horrible to live in compared to picket fence Midwestern suburbs, for example.

Boston actually has a higher percentage of black residents than NYC now.

Having been to both and having spent a lot of time in the latter I find this so so so hard to believe. I believe you could find statistics backing this up but then I wonder about the accuracy of the statistics. Also I understand what you're saying about working/middle class neighborhoods in like Queens and much of Brooklyn being nice to live in but parts of Brooklyn are pretty horrible and the Bronx and most of the area above Central Park really are pretty bad in my opinion

You're substantially overestimating the appeal of New York City to the modal American.

I am, because the American preference appears to be bimodal. 80% of America wants to live in the suburbs, 20% wants to live in NYC, and nobody seems to want to live in Philadelphia or Cleveland, even though they are packed full of the supposedly missing middle of housing stock.

Yeah, still aggressively wrong. No one wants to live in Philly because it's a shithole. Lots of people want to live in Denver or San Diego or Austin as nice cities without massive density. Lots of people want to live in Charleston or Madison or Bentonville. The options are not megalopolis or suburb as preferred destinations. No one in Boise or Bozeman wishes they were a megalopolis or a suburb.

To be fair, the percentage of Americans who want to live in rural areas is almost certainly high enough to drive down the percent that wants to live in suburbs.

Have you been to NYC and gone beyond the "WTC <-> Times Square" region ? NYC is amazing and a lot of your complaints don't seem to apply to the rest of the city. I understand why you'd dislike the "WTC <-> Times Square" region. Even those who live in NYC hate it.

This is what non-expensive middle-class residential neighborhoods look like :

  • Prospect Lefferts gardens 1 & nearby park 1.1

  • Astoria 2 & nearby park 2.2

  • Caroll Gardens 3

And I didn't even mention the actually amazing residential neighborhoods that are more upper-middle class like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope, Clinton Hill or the waterside parts of Jersey.

Have you been to NYC and gone beyond the "WTC <-> Times Square" region ?

Yes, and I've generally hated it. That said, I was just having a conversation the other day about the best cities in the world and I remarked that I haven't really had enough experience with New York to truly compare it to Tokyo or London in any meaningful way, so sure, grain of salt. My impression really is consistent with what most people I know that aren't personally attached to New York think though, which is definitely a contrast with OP's claim that Americans want to either live in New York or a suburb. Pretty much no one that currently resides in Denver is envious of the New York lifestyle.

Prospect Lefferts gardens 1 & nearby park 1.1

I just looked on Redfin and it appears that 1K square foot condos in the area are seven-figures. That this passes for "non-expensive" in the area reinforces to me that you pretty much have to be rich to swing even a tolerably decent standard of living in NYC.

And I didn't even mention the actually amazing residential neighborhoods that are more upper-middle class like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Park Slope, Clinton Hill or the waterside parts of Jersey.

On the flip side, I spent some time in Greenwich, which I would describe, roughly, as "hell on Earth". Among places where there's evident affluence, I've never been somewhere that I wanted to escape more.

Greenwich

Greenwich is also in the "WTC <-> Times Square" region. Greenpoint is in Brooklyn. You're correct that the densest parts of Manhattan are overwhelming in an alien manner, where someone who hasn't grown up there will find it too intimidating.

Funnily enough, having grown up in a 'nice residential part' of the arguably densest city in the world, I feel a similar 'hell on earth I need to escape' feeling when I walk through a sprawling maze-like suburb.

it appears that 1K square foot condos in the area are seven-figures

A 1k sqft house will be around 800k in prospect lefferts gardens today. But it is also one of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of Brooklyn. It was closer to $500k just a few years ago. Not cheap, but reasonable for the region. Especially given that NYC prices are destined to hold stable. Remember, a public school teacher or a blue collar worker in NYC can easily make around $80-100k. (Subway drivers & Public school teachers make ~90K), so it is not too bad.

Pretty much no one that currently resides in Denver is envious of the New York lifestyle.

This is a fallacy. No one wants to turn any city into NYC, because that's impossible. No place is NYC.

The goal is to make urban down towns less hostile. Take a 500 acre downtown circle and strip 2 car lanes from the all roads there. Add high-frequency bus only lanes & bike lanes that run within that small zone. Replace parking lots with missing middle-housing. Put large parking lots on the highway approach to this area. There, you just made your urban hellhole an urban paradise, provided more housing, and car owners aren't any more inconvenienced. Maybe move downtown Denver closer to downtown Miami in scale.

The goal to make suburbs less Hostile. To remove a few yards and add a few triple deckers. You'd expect it to look like Seattle's recently developing Wallingford/fremont neighborhoods than NYC. The suburban houses are still there, many yards are still there. It is still quiet, has good parking and feels safe. Or even Portland Maine. Both are perfectly walkable, bikeable urbanist darlings. There is even good bus connectivity within the main urban area.

Urbanists suggestions for rural areas are similarly in-keeping with the needs of a rural town. Northeastern villages are fairly walkable and cycle-able too. See Lincoln NH.

Urbanists suggestions for rural areas are similarly in-keeping with the needs of a rural town. Northeastern villages are fairly walkable and cycle-able too. See Lincoln NH.

Rural small towns are by definition extremely walkable -- their radius tends to be in the 1-2 mile range, and they all have grocery stores, schools and stuff.

What do the urbanists have in mind for fucking over rural small-towners?

Greenwich is also in the "WTC <-> Times Square" region.

Sorry, I was referring to Greenwich, CT as a mirror to the North, in reference to the New Jersey portion of things, not Greenwich Village. My mistake for the ambiguity. I do stand by really, really disliking it there though.

Funnily enough, having grown up in a 'nice residential part' of the arguably densest city in the world, I feel a similar 'hell on earth I need to escape' feeling when I walk through a sprawling maze-like suburb.

So do I! The places that I understand the desire to live in the least of all types of housing are the McMansion buildouts in modern developments. I can talk myself through what people see in it, but I can't imagine even considering living there. Incredibly dense urban areas have their charms to visit even though I wouldn't live there, rural areas have obvious perks for the more independent minded (still not me), the less uniform suburbs often look fine to me, but that cookie-cutter development just looks awful. My real preference is big towns and small cities that are dense enough to have all of the amenities I'd like, but still fairly low vehicular traffic, which is exactly what I've chosen for a location.

We're actually 100% on the same page with regard to urbanist policy, entertainingly enough.

As an addendum, I really do need to apologize for being a dick about New York. It's honestly pretty uncalled for. I'm well aware that it's home to quite a few people that love it there. Sorry about that.

You know another benefit of the suburbs, or even the exurbs, over the city?

Political stability.

I currently live in a relatively sparsely populated county that virtually forbids development. It has a very stable population of people with 30 year mortgages and very few apartments or rentals. Entryist cannot just rent here en mass, and start voting for policies to the ruin of the rest of the community.

Having lived in a denser, more politically volatile region my entire adult life, I did not realize what a psychological burden this was until it was lifted off of me. I sincerely hope it stays this way. It probably won't. The joke in my region, is that the region I left is coming. I mean, they aren't wrong. I came from there after all. I was talking to another dad while our kids played at a park in a similar situation. We of course had to jokingly add that we don't count. He bought a tractor and I have backyard chickens. We aren't like those other transplants who just want to turn our new home into the shithole our last home was.

During the last midterm, I think my county voted something like 80%+ Republican. However, we got gerrymandered such that just enough of the densely populated hellhole I left has been added to our county's electoral map to consistently swing things D. So maybe it just won't matter anymore who lives here or what we want. We've been permanently denied representation.

Where's the agency here? Why don't you and the other dad and other people in your neighborhood form coalitions in local politics?

Really, local politics in the US is typically dominated by a small cabal of 20-50 people that are way too invested. If you spend a few years growing a coalition it's not hard to take over an area.

If there's one thing cities have, it's political stability. You know who is going to get elected, because it's whoever the machine designates.

Until your local Democratic machine decides that incarceration and law enforcement are actually bad things. It gets gross fast then.

But I live in the suburbs where the cops have a different attitude.

There may be stability in the machine that runs a city, but there is little stability in the whimsical dictates it subjects you to as seemingly random hysterias grip it.

A lot of this is more Trump than transplants. Ten years ago Pittsburgh's wealthier suburbs were all Republican strongholds. Now Mt. Lebanon and Fox Chapel (old money) are as blue as anywhere and Upper Saint Clair (new money) is about 50/50. A decade ago this would have been unthinkable. Even wealthier places that still lean R aren't leaning as much as they used to; even exurbs like Peters and Cranberry saw a pretty big swing towards Democrats. The only places that are actually moving right are the poorer white areas where people have a bunch of crap in their yards and smack their kids in supermarket checkout lines. It's almost become a joke around here that if you see a dumpy, unkempt house in an otherwise nice area there's probably a Trump sign in front of it. It's sort of replaced having a dog tied up in the front yard.

Trump didn't lose the suburbs, the demographics of suburbs changed as older generations died off and were replaced with younger, less white ones. This effect swamps anything Trump may have accelerated. This is a continuing failure mode of GOP electoral politics for over 10 years and Trump is just a convenient excuse for their failure, the PA GOP being in a special class of inept, incompetent, malicious, or all the above.

This is Pittsburgh. There are no "less white" suburbs except for Penn Hills, unless you count old mill towns that always voted Democratic anyway, and you shouldn't because they're nobody's idea of a suburb. The areas I listed are all > 90% white.

Pittsburg is roughly 5% less white now than 10 years ago and 8-9% less white than 20 years ago. Would you have suspected that? Have you looked at the demo surveys of the areas you listed or is this just based on your perception?

Yeah, I looked at them. The areas in question are about 5% less white than they were 20 years ago, but this is largely due to an influx of South Asians, many of whom are immigrants and can't vote. It should be noted that the most prominent of these is D. Raja, Mt. Lebanon councilman best known for a couple unsuccessful bids for higher office, who served as chair of the Allegheny County Republican party. In any event, I don't think a five point increase in Asians is what's driving a 25-40 point increase in Democratic vote share.

Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in Mt. Lebanon (38 districts)(pdf warning) by ~8 points in 2012. How much did Clinton and Biden beat Trump by in 2016 and 2020?

edit: I would find out, but the Allegheny county website Error 403s me when I try to look it up.

I don't know about 2016 but in 2020 it was 20 to 40 points in most precincts.

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Entryist cannot just rent here en mass, and start voting for policies to the ruin of the rest of the community.

Don't say it too loudly, the HUD will force your community to start Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which might entail some "affordable housing" and the People of Affordability that come with it.

I recall the Obama administration pushing for more mixed income housing. I don't know if they actually made any, but I recall the horrified response from conservatives.

Naturally there is a federal program to destroy stable communities.

Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any.

It's not a suburb, the hint is in the name of your home itself: townhouse. That's like saying Kingston or St. Albans are London suburbs.

Surprisingly, people who complain about the suburbs never say that we should all move to a master-planned New Urbanist suburb.

They don't? They harp on and on about the missing middle housing, from semi-detached houses through townhouses to five-over-ones.

I've lived in townhomes and condos in suburbs. They certainly weren't in the city and were surrounded by suburban houses. That's a townhouse in the suburbs. It's not a contradiction.

It's not a suburb, the hint is in the name of your home itself: townhouse. That's like saying Kingston or St. Albans are London suburbs.

In the American context, they're suburbs because they are newly built and at a distance from the city. We don't have cathedral cities with deep history.

They don't? They harp on and on about the missing middle housing, from semi-detached houses through townhouses to five-over-ones.

I live in a townhouse, a couple blocks away from a four-over-one, in a neighborhood with parks and dedicated walking trails. It seems half my neighbors are upwardly mobile Indian and Chinese professionals.

It's the suburbs though, and we get smeared by young blue tribers in the city, because they grew up in places like this and they want to feel superior to us.

As an aside, the number of townhouse and condo developments I see going up in the suburbs near me suggests that the whole "missing middle housing" thing is a bit of a scam. The problem isn't that you can't build medium density in the suburbs, it's that these places are still going to be car dependent and have huge parking lots or include garages. Unless these urbanists are proposing to completely level the existing built environment to satisfy their aesthetic preferences, changing a few zoning regulations isn't going to have much of an impact.

It will help on the margins, which is all that I person hope for these days. But, does your municipality enforce parking minimums and what are they? An frequent new urbanist complaint is that in many places parking mimums regs are significantly higher than they need to be.

What would work best is if local government worked with developers to create contiguous multi-developer corridors of medium density developments linked together, but that would likely require strong incentives.

That's not really possible because there aren't contiguous sites available for development.

Of course it won't have immediate impact. But you can't run public transit into SFH suburbs. Medium density suburbs of townhouses can get away with on-street parking and can support buses or trams. With an established route into the suburb you can upzone the land around the stop to support higher density without parking minimums, just on-street parking and maybe a multilevel garage.

As much as urbanists like to talk about parking minimums, they're as much a creation of the market as of local government. Show me a suburban residential development without guaranteed parking and I'll show you a development that won't sell any units. Why combine the inconvenience of urban life with the inconvenience of suburban life?

Removal of parking minimums doesnt necessarily mean no parking. The urbanist thesis is that code-enforced parking minimums are often higher than would be supported by the market

Medium density suburbs of townhouses can get away with on-street parking and can support buses or trams.

Even the cities largely cannot support buses or trams. The problem with public transit is it is either: 1) Almost always empty; or 2) Isn't convenient enough for all your needs so you need a car anyway.

Kingston and St Albans are London suburbs, though. Even if they’re more ancient than the expansion of the city, towns that become bedroom communities for people who work in the city (as both of those have) become suburbs. You can stretch it and call them exurbs, maybe.

It's not a suburb, the hint is in the name of your home itself: townhouse

In modern usage, "townhouse" is a particular type of home. They are quite common in suburban condominium developments in the US.

I know what a towhouse is. I meant that they provide sufficient density to count as urban. Brooklyn brownstones are townhouses, and it's definitely not a suburb of Manhattan.

Well, that depends on what percentage of the housing is composed of townhouses, right? The mere fact that OP lives in a townhouse does not mean that his community is not suburban. See my links to townhouses for sale in Simi Valley, which is clearly suburban

I think whether or not a townhouse is suburban or not has more to do with its location and surroundings than it does with the type of housing. In the US ‘townhouse’ developments are common housing for the poor and working class in the suburbs (eg. one sees many in outer Queens and Brooklyn). In the previous user’s case they’re more affluent and so these townhouses tend to be semi-dense planned neighborhoods built by a single developer in the suburbs but designed with some limited walkability within the complex.

Technically a large Brooklyn brownstone is a townhouse but for various reasons (including most saliently lack of any off-street parking) they tend to be much denser than townhouse developments built from the late 20th century onwards.

they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between

Or is it rather that outside of New York City, a handful of other small cities and college towns, nowhere else in America provides a relatively safe dense, walkable urban core? In the majority of medium to large sized cities in the United States you cannot even live this kind of life without significant compromises. There may be condo buildings downtown but they’re not located in dense, walkable neighborhoods, the young PMC residents therein just have to Uber everywhere.

I’ve often heard on Reddit and in real life how strange it is for foreigners to visit American urban cores (even comparatively dense downtowns - when compared to Midwestern sprawl - like San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia) and find so few people walking the streets. American cities outside NYC feel empty. Most major cities are even worse, downtown is a few skyscrapers and condo buildings and a sports arena, separated by huge parking lots. Crime rate aside (and that’s a big, big aside in many places), “walking around” say downtown St Louis is like walking around a larger suburban business park in Europe where everyone drives in.

It’s clear that Americans do want this kind of housing. The handful of ex-NYC neighborhoods that offer even the vaguest semblance of this kind of lifestyle are often extremely expensive. See Venice and Santa Monica in LA, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Back Bay in Boston and so on.

The problem is that the only way this kind of thing emerges organically is because it was already there or because of the gentrification of dense urban neighborhoods that survived the 20th century (eg. what has happened in Brooklyn since the 1980s). You can’t build it because large downtown parcels of contiguous land rarely come up for sale and when they do developers would prefer to build a few big condo buildings, a large parking lot (often mandated by zoning laws) and stuff a small mall on the lower levels instead of creating more of a mid-rise community. And in many US cities where downtowns were hollowed out for parking lots and office buildings between 1950 and 1980, there just isn’t the residential capacity to make the network of small local businesses that bring that kind of community to life viable. So there’s a chicken-and-egg problem to it.

That said, there have been some attempts. Pre-pandemic downtown LA was undergoing pretty rapid densification to a more residential, walkable place, although it’s worse again now.

It’s clear that Americans do want this kind of housing. The handful of ex-NYC neighborhoods that offer even the vaguest semblance of this kind of lifestyle are often extremely expensive. See Venice and Santa Monica in LA, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Back Bay in Boston and so on.

There are millions of dirt-cheap middle-density units in America that cost nearly nothing.

Half of Philadelphia is mid-rise. The majority of Cleveland proper is. Huge swathes of St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are. In many of these places, you can buy a house for the price of a loaded pickup truck.

I love my suburban townhouse, but it's selling at a slight discount to similarly-sized houses with yards in the same development I live in. I'd rather walk two blocks along a walking trail to the nearest park than deal with maintaining a yard, but it seem the market has spoken and people want to live in Irvine.

People don't make their decisions based on the built environment though, they act based on their social environment. I'm moving from my nearly-perfect townhouse to a sprawling, Euclidean-zoned 80s suburb with a huge yard in a place with worse weather, and I'm happy about it. My in-laws live there, and kids should be near family.

I think that's why people complain about suburbs. Their family lives there, and they're trying to distance themselves from them.

Half of Philadelphia is mid-rise. The majority of Cleveland proper is. Huge swathes of St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are. In many of these places, you can buy a house for the price of a loaded pickup truck.

Yeah, and the places where a house costs the same as a pickup truck are not, generally, the places where it’s safe to actually enjoy the amenities of living in a dense neighborhood, like being able to walk to and from dinner, to let the kids play outside and walk to their friends’ houses, to not worry about extreme risk of property theft. Kensington in Philly wouldn’t be undesirable if the police did what was necessary to make it safe, clean and amenable to middle class people. But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities. You just have to get serious about it.

But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities.

The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.

Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites

But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities.

The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.

Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites

Reminds me of the hard times meme.

Also, use two spaces for line breaks, two returns to turn each line into a paragraph, or turn your comment into an unnumbered list.

This isn't true either. I look at an inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh like Dormont. It's about as walkable as one can reasonably expect. It has 2 nice main drags with lots of amenities, and it's affordable; less than a decade ago you could get a 3 bedroom house for under 100k. There was a time when people called it "Dirtmont" because it was kind of dumpy and working-class, but it was never dangerous, and no one would ever look down on anyone who lived there the way they'd even look down on someone living in a similarly white working-class area like Carrick. But now, people seem to like it. But not enough that people are banging down the doors to get in. There are a ton of areas like that around Pittsburgh, a lot of them in the city proper, but only trendy areas like Lawrenceville seem to be getting unaffordable (at least by Pittsburgh standards). I can't speak to other cities, but I doubt this is a unique situation.

the same as a pickup truck are not, generally, the places where it’s safe to actually enjoy the amenities of living in a dense neighborhood

This does not stop people from living in non-walkable housing in similarly terrible neighborhoods.

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It’s clear that Americans do want this kind of housing. The handful of ex-NYC neighborhoods that offer even the vaguest semblance of this kind of lifestyle are often extremely expensive. See Venice and Santa Monica in LA, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Back Bay in Boston and so on.

The problem is that the only way this kind of thing emerges organically is because it was already there or because of the gentrification of dense urban neighborhoods that survived the 20th century (eg. what has happened in Brooklyn since the 1980s). You can’t build it because large downtown parcels of contiguous land rarely come up for sale and when they do developers would prefer to build a few big condo buildings, a large parking lot (often mandated by zoning laws) and stuff a small mall on the lower levels instead of creating more of a mid-rise community. And in many US cities where downtowns were hollowed out for parking lots and office buildings between 1950 and 1980, there just isn’t the residential capacity to make the network of small local businesses that bring that kind of community to life viable. So there’s a chicken-and-egg problem to it.

Amen, thank you for beating this drum with me. The market has shown that people will pay a ton for this kind of housing, and any sort of mixed-use residential/commercial developments that do get built are typically very high-class and quite desirable. Prices reflect that reality.

The true cause of these issues, specifically the large parcels of land being sat on, goes down to how we value/price land in the US. Land values at local assessors' offices are literally calculated by taking an arbitrary % of the total value, and saying "That's the land value!". You will see values of improvements (buildings) jump up 20-30% in one year, and assessors just shrug their shoulders and say 'that's how our system calculated it.' It is utterly absurd.

What's worse is that many large department stores, like Walmart etc, who buy these massive parcels of land often have specific tax cuts for them that they carve out with local government. On top of that, the plattage effect means that land value does not rise linearly with square footage, it drops off as you get an increasingly large parcel. There are good reasons for that, but it turns into a situation where large retail stores can acquire massive amounts of land for cheap, and they do.

This isn't even getting into land speculators who sit on vacant land for years as an investment, because they know it's one of the safest investments out there. After the massive housing price raise during Covid we're seeing far more activity in the land speculation space as well. For some reason we've decided to tax buildings, the things that actually generate economic activity and benefit, far more than land. This is ridiculous because useful land parcels in desirable locations are scarce and if you let people sit on them, you miss out on a ton of opportunity to beautify a space, create new businesses, or just leave the land to nature.

IMO dense cities should have practically 0 vacant lots sitting there, ever. Land needs to be taxed far higher than it is currently.

the plattage effect means that land value does not rise linearly with square footage, it drops off as you get an increasingly large parcel. There are good reasons for that

How does that work? It seems to be a well-studied effect, yet I would naively assume that an owner of a large parcel in such a market would always choose to subdivide that parcel, thereby making more money, up until the point where the thereby increased supply of small parcels and reduced supply of large ones eliminated the effect. I could imagine constant-cost overheads (if you need the same number of real estate + escrow + whatever agents whether you're selling a fifth of an acre or 50 acres, the 1/5-acre option has 25x as much transaction cost per square foot) ... but economists seem to be modeling the plattage effect as logarithmic, and I don't see how that would happen at all.

I would naively assume that an owner of a large parcel in such a market would always choose to subdivide that parcel,

Many big businesses like Walmart, Target etc require large parcels all in one segment to operate by law. Also, I forgot to mention they get massive subsidies on their parking lots as well since parking lots are often not taxed like normal parcels or have specific adjustments/write-ins from the city.

Those are great demand-side reasons for Walmart to bid up the price of large parcels ... but apparently they didn't, so what's the supply-side reason why someone would want to sell them a parcel anyway? If I can make $M by selling N acres to Walmart but I can make 2($M/2+$P) by instead selling N/2 acres each to a restaurant and a gym, why would I ever do the former if the premium $P for the latter is positive?

Subdivision is not always trivial. I would not say that the there is only a single fixed cost, there are also variable costs associated with land surveys, environmental surveys, administration, utilities, etc.

Then there are selection effects. Areas with large blocks of land are usually more rural which have lower land prices.

I have a feeling that the complete picture here has to do with the marginal utility of developed vs undeveloped land, economies of scale, and maybe commercial vs residential markets.

It seems intuitive to me that the utility value of developed land does not scale linearly with size, unless you're a farmer or something.

If I'm a large developer that can afford to buy a large parcel, subdivide, AND develop those parcels, I will likely (up to a point) get a better ROI from a larger number of smaller plots. In SFH residential markets this happens often because there is a consumer desire to "own" their plot. In commercial markets, this demand matters less, so the ROI maximizing strategy is to buy a large plot, build X storefronts, and rent to tenants. The size and distribution of those storefronts should reflect the market for commercial renters, and I think that is what you do see (a decent mix of large home-depot style tenants and smaller independent businesses).

Yet on the other hand, selling a small plot of undeveloped land is challenging since you need to develop it, and you will almost always be outcompeted by large developers who can afford to buy the larger plot in one go.

So you have a market dynamic where both things are true: the utility (and marginal market) value of the developed land is proportionally greater for small plots (or small storefronts), yet it is not always useful to simply buy a large plot, subdivide, and resell.

All this is to say, holders of large plots of undeveloped land are usually incentivized to sell in one go. Whereas developers are incentivised to buy large plots and then extract maximum utility via subdivision or multiple storefronts, which is what I think we do see in practice.

That all makes sense; thank you!

any sort of mixed-use residential/commercial developments that do get built are typically very high-class and quite desirable.

Where permitting and regulatory regimes are complex, slow, restrictive, and carry significant ongoing costs (i.e. mandatory set-asides for "affordable" units) for those few projects that do get approved, developers are highly incentivized to make all new construction as high-class and high-cost as possible in order to maximize return per unit; they can set their own price because pent-up demand is so high, and face little competition from other new builds to drive down cost.

That's the reason mixed-use projects in major cities are so "high class and desirable" - not any inherent property of the type of units being built.

This.

Also, there is always incentive to market your product, regardless of it's actual place in the market, as "luxury" or "premium". Nobody sells "cheap cars for poor people", but they will market "affordable, reliable vehicles".

The fact that as you say “pent-up demand is so high” is exactly the point that he’s making, though.

I mean pent-up demand for any new housing in an economically-productive area; I postulate the fact that they're housing units on the market in west-side LA (in the case of his Venice example) is much more important for driving demand than their character as "missing middle" or whether or not neighborhoods are walkable, serviced by transit, or otherwise Urbanist-ideology-approved. People happily pay out the nose for studios or "shared living" dorm spaces with no transit, a mile walk to the nearest grocery, and no dedicated parking, just because it's a place to live.

Years ago there was a Silicon Valley rental ad that was for an unusually wide gap between walls with a foam mat laid onto the unfinished floor to sleep on. Like how a rodent might live. But you gotta live somewhere and they keep importing more people and they don't build comparably more housing, so live like a rat I guess.

Property taxes on real estate are rather weird in general: structures in many jurisdictions are valued well above the replacement cost, which as far as I can tell reflects artificial scarcity from permitting and zoning restrictions. The value of "a roof to live under in [jurisdiction]" far exceeds the cost of the roof itself and the land to put it on! And that doesn't include manufacturing businesses having to play games with inventory to limit property taxes on that.

All this has made me think that the Georgists aren't wrong and that we should consider taxing property near-exclusively based on the land itself to incentivise more efficient utilization.

structures in many jurisdictions are valued well above the replacement cost

Actually a lot of this is due to the fact that quality of construction and depreciation are rather arbitrary place to place, and appraiser to appraiser. So especially in the big counties you can literally have two assessors that would look at the same building, one mark it grade A and another mark it grade C. It's rather wild.

But most of it is the fact that the land/improvement splits are garbage based on nothing.

When it comes to calculating value, quality of construction is usually one of the top factors in driving value as well. At least for residential parcels.

There's a reason that safe and dense housing only exists in expensive areas: it has to be expensive to keep the undesirables out. You can have safe and affordable (in the country), you can have dense and affordable (the hood) or you can have dense and safe (Manhattan) but you can't have all three. The parent comment brought up St. Louis, well St. Louis has plenty of neighborhoods like the urbanists want with dense housing and walkable grid streets, check out Gravois Park or Dutchtown on street view. That's what a dense and affordable neighborhood looks like in the US.

There's a reason that safe and dense housing only exists in expensive areas: it has to be expensive to keep the undesirables out.

Which ones? San Francisco is 40% white, 35% Asian, 5% black (a much lower proportion in the latter case than Paris, London and many other major European cities). It has extremely high median income. The reason it is a shithole has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with policy (regarding the homeless, mostly).

Enforce the law, and it’s entirely possible to have affordable, safe and dense housing. Inner cities (provided they’re safe, amenable and walkable) will always be expensive, but dense inner suburbs like in most Euro cities and NYC are totally feasible.

Which ones? San Francisco is 40% white, 35% Asian, 5% black (a much lower proportion in the latter case than Paris, London and many other major European cities). It has extremely high median income. The reason it is a shithole has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with policy (regarding the homeless, mostly).

It's a shithole precisely because of demographics.

Childless PMC whites in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland vote for shithole policies because they're the shithole demographic. Once you get out to Bay Area suburbs that are full of Indians and Chinese, the shithole factor declines to nearly nothing.

Quite a few of the most zealous supervisors and school board members in SF have been Asian, iirc.

Back in the 1950s-80s 5-10% was often the tipping point for safety.

2 out of 3 for safe, affordable and dense is a best case scenario. You can have somewhere like San Francisco that manages to do worse than that and is overrun with petty crime despite high prices. I agree that enforcing the law would work but that's a hypothetical. If anything the voters have turned strongly against tough on crime policies compared to five years ago so I don't see any signs that it's about to change. In the world as it exists (in the US) if you want dense and safe housing you need to be ready to write a huge check.

There are plenty of areas in NYC that are dense* and safe middle class neighborhoods. Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, etc.

*Relative to most of the rest of the US.

A 1000 square foot apartment is over $800k in Jackson Heights so I think we have different definitions of middle class.

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]" The 2021 median income for the US as a whole was $70,784.

Per www.streeteasy.com there are currently 48 2-bed+ apts for sale in Jackson Heights. Fifteen are listed at under $400K. There are only two for more than $800K,

I see a few on Zillow in the $400k range but they don't list the square footage so I assume it's not suitable for a family. Found one that does list it as 850 square feet but it also has an $850 per month HOA fee.

My $800k was an overestimate but buying a place large enough for a family still seems insane for what you get, though doable if you're willing to part with more than half your take home on mortgage+ HOA fees.

I suggest you look at Streeteasy, which is the go-to site for NY real estate. I see a 1050 sq ft unit for 425K, five separate 1000 sq ft units in the $340 range; several others with no sq ft listed but with floor plans.

still seems insane for what you get,

Well, we all know that NYC apts tend to be small. But that is the nature of the city. There are plenty of much more expensive places in more upscale areas that are no larger. It really says nothing about whether a particular area is middle class. As i noted, the median household income there is right at the US median.

also has an $850 per month HOA fee.

Remember, most of the places you see are coops, and that means that the HOA fee includes property tax, insurance and, usually, heat and water. In some places it includes the electric bill, but I think that is rare. Plus, the HOA fee covers garbage and other standard city services fees.

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A lot of the talk about suburbs is confused because "suburb" can refer to many forms of development that are less dense than skyscrapers. Commonly what urbanists are referring to when they hate on suburbs is the sort of low-density, single-family neighborhoods built throughout North America. Some urbanists (like Adam Something) make a distinction between American-style suburbs and European-style suburbs, and their argument is that European-style suburbs are better, because they are denser ("missing middle" housing) and can be served with transit.

If I were to be charitable to urbanists, I would say they just use "suburb" as a shorthand since many people in the States will think of a low-density, single-family neighborhood when they hear that word, and that is indeed what urbanists are talking about (and railing against). They don't need to put any more qualifiers than "suburb", because most of the time they aren't comparing between European-style and American-style suburbs, and they don't really have any qualms about abolishing even European-style suburbs as they prefer living in the urban cores anyway.

Some urbanists (like Adam Something) make a distinction between American-style suburbs and European-style suburbs, and their argument is that European-style suburbs are better, because they are denser ("missing middle" housing) and can be served with transit.

I live an European-density townhouse in an outer ring master planned suburb. We still get smeared by the weekly lefty newspaper in town, because their real beef isn't with our built environment. Their real beef is that their parents and high school classmates live here, and they want to feel superior to us.

Indeed. That's why I prefaced the next part with "if I were to be charitable". Sadly, many urbanists in real life do not behave as a charitable one would.

I've seen local Finnish urbanist/YIMBY types occasionally sneering against our suburbs and favoring basically an urban-core-only based building strategy. I saw one acquaintance just say openly that he doesn't consider anything apart from central and southern Helsinki (ie. the core areas) to be "real Helsinki".

I just moved from one suburb to another. In my old suburb, I could get to store/library/health center/gym/kindergarten etc. in 15 mins by walking. In my new one I can get to all of these (expect gym) in 5 mins if I walk briskly. I'm not sure what I'd gain by moving to the core, expect status.

Just goes to show that even in Europe, it's not enough. Europe solves many of their complaints, but they can always find something new. Even Not Just Bikes said he's ceased talking about North America to focus on advocacy in Europe, because there's apparently (or at least it seems like he thinks this) a real risk that Europe will backslide into car-dependency hell. He attributes this hypothetical backslide to the rise of right-leaning parties.

Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs.

There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.

I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.

My understanding is that a family home is explicitly not a third place, because a third place is by definition a neutral public meeting ground with a semi-rotating cast of characters who have no obligation to be there. It might be possible to make one's house a third place by hosting enough open and regular events and parties, but that would be quite unusual, and would be made unnecessary if more typical meeting spaces e.g. coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, dance clubs, etc. were common enough to meet people's need for socializing.

There is a reason many of those urban cores lost their population and it isn't just because the people there decided they wanted to move out one day because of changes in technology or lifestyle. Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.

Suburban Atlanta and DFW and Houston have seen rapid growth even in areas with race issues and high crime rates. People are willing to put up with racial tensions and crime to live in low-density suburbs but not high density urban areas.

Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.

The more I've learned about that era, the angrier I've become at the "Civil Rights" advocates and other leftists that implemented policies that destroyed American cities almost completely. This wasn't some force of nature, it was a set of deliberate choices by people that just hate bourgeois white culture and were happy to destroy it. There was always going to be some degree of shift and decline in Great Lakes cities that lost manufacturing, but the abject ruin that Detroit became wasn't a foregone conclusion.

If your go-to example (per your comment below) of "policies that destroyed American cities" is Shelley v Kramer, which simply prevented blatant, intentional racial discrimination, then you probably don't have much cause to be angry.

This wasn't some force of nature, it was a set of deliberate choices by people that just hate bourgeois white culture and were happy to destroy it

If anything was destroyed, it was bourgeois black culture, as middle class blacks moved out of Harlem, the Central Avenue area of Los Angeles, etc..

If your go-to example (per your comment below) of "policies that destroyed American cities" is Shelley v Kramer, which simply prevented blatant, intentional racial discrimination, then you probably don't have much cause to be angry.

Why?

Have you ever been to the area where the Shelley House is located in North St. Louis? Sadly enough, what you see there today is better than what it was after the civil rights revolution. Whatever your opinions about racial discrimination are, the people supporting using it in restrictive covenants predicted their area would turn to ghettoized trash and that is exactly what happened. The Shelley House on Labadue Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri, is an excellent example of exactly what the above user was claiming and was angry about. The only argument is whether or not the intentional policy decisions of the SCOTUS contributed to what happened and what we see today.

Do you happen to know when that area of St. Louis became a hollowed out ghetto?

Why?

Because it is wrong, and because people can always come up with some rationalization for mistreating their outgroup, and because black parents have the same right to move to an area where their children will have a better life as everyone else, even assuming that the area they are trying to leave is bad because other black people live there.

except the "rationalization" for mistreating the outgroup in this circumstance predicted what would happen and then what they predicted proceeded to happen at enormous social cost, including in the exact "outgroup" you're claiming to be concerned with here

it is wrong

"rights" aren't some natural phenomena and neither is your vague "rights" morality, they're intentional decisions and those decisions have costs

The Shelley decision demonstrates that quite well which makes your response odd. Your post is essentially "it's wrong," which is fine, but it's not particularly interesting.

"rights" aren't some natural phenomena and neither is your vague "rights" morality,

Neither is your consequentialist morality. Not that you bother to actually weigh all of the consequences

Your post is essentially "it's wrong," which is fine, but it's not particularly interesting.

And yours is essentially "it has costs," which is not particularly interesting. All policies come with costs.

including in the exact "outgroup" you're claiming to be concerned with here

I not expressing concern for any particular outgroup. The principle would be the same, regardless of the outgroup. Hence my generalization about people in general, not these specific people.

As I noted, racial discrimination in housing prevented black parents from moving to areas where their children would have a better life. If a white parent could afford to move to some suburb with good schools, he or she was free to do so. But a black parent was out of luck. As you implicitly acknowledge, that is in fact a bad thing (or, if you prefer, it has costs). If you did not believe that it is a bad thing, you would argue that it does not matter, but you don't. Instead, you merely argue that the alternative had high costs.

Your post minimized/denied there were costs to the Shelley decision. I pointed out the doom-and-gloom predictions of the party who originally filed suit were proved correct. Despite your claims it wasn't a good example to validate the anger the OP was claiming, it's a great example.

your consequentialist morality.

As you implicitly acknowledge, that is in fact a bad thing (or, if you prefer, it has costs). If you did not believe that it is a bad thing, you would argue that it does not matter, but you don't. Instead, you merely argue that the alternative had high costs.

none of this is accurate

not a consequentialist, did not implicitly acknowledge that, didn't argue it was and the post was to argue the costs of the particular example you picked which you were implying wasn't much or at all; when asked you moved on to "it's wrong"

it's low-effort non-response and belittling with zero explanation or support

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This is an incorrect reading of the cited discussion. I was responding primarily to the destruction of American cities that occurred during the '60s and '70s, someone else mentioned that suburbanization began before that era, and I noted that this may well have something to do with Shelley. I don't think any single policy accounts for the damage that was done in the name of equality, but that the aggregated weight of civil rights policies, leftist approaches to crime and business, and the Great Society policies accumulated to basically ruin urban cores.

I will certainly agree that the civil rights policies have been terrible for black culture as well though.

Nevertheless, your implication that the "destruction of American cities" was the result of intentional efforts to destroy white bourgeois culture" is ahistorical. If you mean that efforts to end obviously unjust social practices had some negative unintended consequences, then why not say that, instead of "my outgroup evil"?

Nevertheless, your implication that the "destruction of American cities" was the result of intentional efforts to destroy white bourgeois culture" is ahistorical.

No, it was, it's just that some suburbanization would have happened anyway. The destruction of American cities was the result of ethnic cleansing engaged in to drive white people out of the cities, which was then called "white flight".

Not if the term, "ethnic cleansing" has any meaning.

You say tomayto, I say tomahto? What's the difference between "obviously unjust social practices" and "white bourgeois culture", from the perspective of the people driving the changes in question?

I was of course referring to blatant racial discrimination. Practices which were seen as obviously unjust by most people at the time, which is why both major political parties found it politically advantageous to pledge in their platforms to enact civil rights legislation as early as 1948. (I assume that a link to the 1948 Democratic Party platform is unnecessary).

Edit: Apparently, I was mistaken in my assumption that a link showing that the Democratic Party also had a civil rights plank in 1948 was unnecessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Democratic_National_Convention

assume that a link to the 1948 Democratic Party platform is unnecessary).

The democrats were the segregationist party, and more generally post-1975 political divisions don’t map well onto earlier ones, so if anything democrats would be more likely to oppose civil rights law.

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The people who disproportionately influenced the end of blatant racial discrimination disproportionately despised "white bourgeoise culture", and saw destroying it as a good thing. The song I linked is famous because it captured the essence of the social critique being leveled against the mainstream of its time. Listen to the song, note the problems the song is asserting exist, and then tell me those "problems" weren't addressed.

Hating bad things doesn't make one good. Virulent racists hate rape and murder a whole lot; that doesn't make their solutions net-positive. The "end of blatant racial discrimination", as your phrasing appears to concede, succeeded in altering surface detail without addressing the core of the problem. Lots and lots of black people lived in misery and died violently as a result.

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Any specific sources that expand on this? I'm curious to hear more from this angle.

To be fair, suburbanization began in earnest shortly after WWII (and as far as I can tell, in America but not in Europe); the ethnic cleansing of the cities only accelerated it.

I don't object to people moving to outer rings because they have families and want the space, I only object to neighborhoods being deliberately ruined.

I do think Shelley v. Kraemer times up suspiciously well with the shift to the suburbs though.

I think the effect of covenants has been blown out of proportion, particularly by lefties. I did title work in Western PA for a decade and never saw a racial covenant; they were never a big thing in this area, but it had little effect on suburbanization. Hell, if those redlining maps that people keep bringing up are correct, Pittsburgh was significantly less segregated in the 1930s then it is now; back then no neighborhood was more than 50% black if memory serves.

Suburbs come in all different kinds. Some have community, some are very atomized.

From Arthur Doyle's The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

By eleven o’clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”

“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger."

Now, myself I am a big fan of atomization. I hate the idea of living in a small gossip-ridden community where everything that I do is discussed soon afterward at the local watering hole (and in such a community, there are only 2 or 3 watering holes, so essentially just one because almost everyone who goes to one of them goes to the others as well).

But suburbs can actually encourage, and I can say this from personal experience, a bit too much atomization, to the point that people go insane and pop pills and such with no feedback from anyone, and people can spiral down into shit without having any helping hands to try to pull them out of it.

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

In my experience, not one person in an urban area ever attempted to stop my abuser. At least out in the countryside they called the cops a few times.

This is a lovely theory that was thoroughly disproved by the murder of Kitty Genovese.

No, it wasn't. If you read that Wikipedia article carefully, this was a case of misreporting by the New York Times and the popular account is incorrect. This is all from your own link:

More recent investigations have questioned the original version of events.[58][24][67] A 2004 article in The New York Times by Jim Rasenberger, published on the 40th anniversary of Genovese's murder, raised numerous questions about claims in the original Times article. A 2007 study (confirmed in 2014[24]) found many of the purported facts about the murder to be unfounded, stating there was "no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive".[7] After Moseley's death in March 2016, the Times called their second story "flawed", stating:[8]

While there was no question that the attack occurred, and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call the police. A 70-year-old[fn 1] woman ventured out and cradled the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms. Genovese died on the way to a hospital.

Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the entire incident.[68] Only one witness, Joseph Fink, was aware Genovese was stabbed in the first attack, and only Karl Ross was aware of it in the second attack. Many were entirely unaware that an assault or homicide had taken place; some thought what they saw or heard was a domestic quarrel, a drunken brawl or a group of friends leaving the bar when Moseley first approached Genovese.[7] After the initial attack punctured her lungs, leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation, it is unlikely that Genovese was able to scream at any volume.[69]

A 2015 documentary, featuring Kitty's brother William, discovered that other crime reporters knew of many problems with the story even in 1964. Immediately after the story broke, WNBC police reporter Danny Meehan discovered many inconsistencies in the original article in the Times. Meehan asked Times reporter Martin Gansberg why his article failed to reveal that witnesses did not feel that a murder was happening. Gansberg replied, "It would have ruined the story." Not wishing to jeopardize his career by attacking a powerful figure like Rosenthal, Meehan kept his findings secret and passed his notes to fellow WNBC reporter Gabe Pressman. Later,[when?] Pressman taught a journalism course in which some of his students called Rosenthal and confronted him with the evidence. Rosenthal was irate that his editorial decisions were being questioned by journalism students and angrily berated Pressman in a phone call.[70]

On October 12, 2016, the Times appended an Editor's Note to the online version of its 1964 article, stating that, "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."[5]

On the one hand, the pattern you are pointing to, where a knowledge-producer who provided a foundational block to a lot of peoples' worldview is, yet again, revealed to have simply made it up is deeply infuriating.

On the other hand, this seems to be the quote that's being questioned:

"There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock."

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.

It is true now in first-world Asian cities. It is sufficiently true sufficiently much of the time in most European cities that the average European urbanite would find the discussion above bizarre.

America (apart from NYC) is bad at policing, in the sense that they can't convert dollars spent on policing into crime reduction efficiently. One upshot of this is that Americans keep trying to move to places that don't need policing. Others are that America is unusually tolerant of vigilantism, and that America tends to substitute harsh punishments for effective policing in the same way and for the same reasons that medieval societies did. Americans are sufficiently used to this that they don't seem to find it a problem - probably because they think it is a universal fact about what is possible - and assume that there must be some reason why Singapore doesn't need policing. Singapore does need policing, and is effectively policed. London and Paris also need policing, are less effectively policed, and while safe by American standards have levels of crime that Singaporeans would find intolerable.

Given the absence of any political faction that wants policing to be expensive and useless, I suspect the reasons for this (which are not well understood) are structural rather than being a policy choice. This excellent substack by a retired cop blames the Bill of Rights.

Right. The statement is false now, but the break isn't where the Kitty Genovese story places it -- witnesses will call the police, but they likely won't come in time (also true in Doyle's time) and the machinery of justice is both uncertain and slow.

He's not necessarily wrong, but the increased public pressure pales in comparison to the increased potential for crime caused by vastly greater population density.

First, the obvious one: In the last few decades, suburban growth hasn't been caused by racism. As a matter of fact, blacks and immigrants are moving to the suburbs at a faster rate than whites. Meanwhile, whites have moved into the cities.

I’d like to discourage such a framing, that somehow action [X] is only legitimate if blacks and other non-Asian minorities undertake it.

Such a framing but reifies the moral prioritisation of lower-achieving minorities over whites and Asians. Relevant Motte post: Please just tell me where you think white people are supposed to live.

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There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.

Of course fewer people want to live in places where you don't need cars than they did when cars were unaffordable to most people. That is hardly saying anything, and it doesn't mean more people wouldn't want to live in those areas if the government didn't prevent them from existing.

The people have not spoken. There is no free market. Various taxes and regulations artificially reduce the supply of dense neighbourhoods. That's not to deny that many people like the suburbs. It's just to say that many don't and only do so because of government distortion of the market.

There is more availability of dense neighborhoods than there is demand for them. Yes, many of those dense neighborhoods are not particularly nice, but my not-particularly-nice sprawling suburb has more demand to live in it than supply of housing. The fact of the matter is that most people have a revealed preference for less density.

This seems clearly false to me. What is this based on? If there were a surplus of dense neighbourhoods, you wouldn't see much condo construction, which is an extremely inefficient use of materials for providing housing and is only economically viable when the price of housing is very high.

There is more availability of dense neighborhoods than there is demand for them.

And that's why you can get an apartment in a major metropolis downtown for $50k.

"Downtown" and "dense neighborhoods" are different things. In my city, downtown is a bunch 30 story office buildings, a stadium and some restaurants. It's pretty much empty by 6pm on weekdays. If we're talking about dense, walkable neighborhoods in major cities then yeah you can definitely do that.

Here's a whole house for $40k: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1421-Granville-Pl-Saint-Louis-MO-63112/2966082_zpid/

This isn't even a dense neighborhood. It's a bunch of detached houses and empty lots. Not exactly a slam dunk argument.

It's densely packed houses without big yards, 10 minute walk to a grocery store or restaurants. Of course there's always going to be some reason why it doesn't count.

If you think that a place where 25%-50% of each block is empty is dense I don't know what to tell you. I guess there will always be some ghetto that needs to be passed off as a dense area to advance the argument.

A village of 100 people is also highly walkable to all available amenities but it's not dense.

Slow down. Empty closely packed units are dense in construction and unpopular so not-dense in occupancy. Surely dense construction is the point and not-dense occupancy is revealed preference.

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It’s a dense neighborhood that happens to be empty because no one wants to live there, because the supply of dense walkable neighborhoods exceeds the demand.

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This was true for a significant part of the 1960s-mid 1990s. Ever since the Guiliani-Bloomberg revolution there has been a city renaissance. But, that has little to do with cities being awesome as cities, rather it is due to cities being built, originally, in the best places. People still don't mostly prefer going up 35 stories on an elevator. But they do prefer being very close to a nice waterfront and lots of high paying jobs. The jobs existing there because the water existed their when water was most important.

There's plenty of water to go around. The West Coast of the United States is extremely long. Nevertheless, prices are highest in the dense urban areas.

On the other hand, several big cities (Phoenix, salt lake) are built in the middle of the desert with no useful waterways.

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