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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
As someone who lives in a city without a car and has for close to a decade now, in two different locations in Chicago, this really doesn't seem right to me at all. And I don't know how it connects to the rest of your comment about discrimination.
Is your area actually walkable in the way that the 15 minute city implies? It's not at all my experience that the homeless congregate around grocery stores but there are grocery stores in enough density that it wouldn't even make sense, nearly everywhere near me is 15 minutes or less of a walk from a store, this kind of breaks the needs for homeless people to gather there specifically where they might if they needed to in order to regularly buy/shoplift groceries.
This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)
Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.
But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.
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I would point out that in addition to space for loading and restocking, the American grocery store has been trending larger to offer a wider variety of products. The economies of scale allow stocking two dozen types of cheese and a dozen different varieties of apples in a way that a corner store (which I've visited when travelling) just can't match.
Although I'm rather skeptical of the 15 minute number because despite living in a suburban (in-city) area of single-family homes, there are two major grocery stores within a hair over that that I'd never consider walking to because it'd be impractical to carry a family load of groceries that far. There is a corner store a few hundred yards away that I rarely visit because their selection is pretty small. It's too long of a walk to be a great idea, and I wouldn't trust a bike to not get stolen in a 20 minute visit (or carry an extra 50 pounds), so I drive.
Although I will vouch that the grocery stores tend to be near larger homeless encampments: I suspect it's partly space like you mention, also that food is readily accessible, and also that major grocery stores tend to be on major street corners for easy access. The supply of shopping carts is probably at least a bit attractive too, but I don't have a sense of the scale of that particular problem.
Is crime really so bad where you live that you're seriously worried about someone cutting your bike's U-lock in an area with heavy foot traffic (the entrance to a grocery store) in the time it takes you to do your shopping?
I used to regularly do my grocery shopping by bike back when I didn't live walking distance from a grocery store, so I understand that having to worry about whether the groceries will fit in the bike bags can be a pain and that's a good enough reason to use a car instead, anyway.
I’m confident that I live in the 95th percentile of American ‘bad neighborhoods’ by motteizan standards and I absolutely would not worry about someone cutting a bike lock while I was shopping, if I used a bike. My neighbors seem to make the same calculation based on the number of bikes I see chained outside my local grocery store when I go.
Now leaving a bike outside and completely unattended I understand worrying about, but it seems like anyone who actually uses a bike to get around owns a bike lock.
Perhaps I've personally over-estimated the risk, but the small empty bike rack outside the store next to the store a hundred yards from the local homeless encampment that seems full of likely-stolen bicycles is not confidence inducing. You may have convinced me to try it some time: I do bike to work (which has safe bike storage) sometimes.
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This doesn't sound right at all. It is certainly not true of grocery stores in Manhattan, such as these and of course these. They certainly do not have crappy produce and meat.
The stores you link to are gigantic because they relatively few and far between; they are in places where people cannot easily walk to the grocery stores, so they really don't provide evidence for the claim that places where people can walk to grocery stores have homeless encampments near them.
What does price have to do with your initial claim?
? I am skeptical that the cost of unloading the trucks is a substantial portion of the overall cost of running a grocery store. Surely, to the extent that groceries are more expensive in Manhattan than elsewhere, that is more a function of real estate costs and perhaps overall labor costs.
Stocking is actually a huge labor cost for grocery stores, partly because stockers often get a shift differential to work at night and partly because there’s so much stocking going on all the time.
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That's pretty clearly a market designed for suburbia. Here are the two(potash, jewel) grocery stores near where I used to live, there is now also a nearby Aldi and whole foods. They reliably had fresher meat and produce than any walmart I've ever been to. The Jewel definitely has room for bays but the potash, not so much. Seriously, look at the pictures of the potash, it was no low quality produce or meat and they did not run out.
There is a particular form of grocery store like walmart that is gigantic and meant to serve entire neighborhoods, but that's not the only model that works and I frankly think it's inferior. I much prefer popping in every few days and buying only a few days worth of food that will stay fresh to buying in bulk and freezing half of it.
That jewel osco is right on the border between the very dense gold coast and where it starts to transition to Lincoln Park. Around a mile from dead center of down town and on a red line track. It is very very not suburban. You could walk from the Hancock tower to it in 15 minutes.
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