> We need very high density around where people live. This is the most important thing ever.
Strongly disagree, why? In the suburbs you spend 10x less time in traffic, and have access to 10x more because it takes 15 minutes to go 10 miles vs the 1 hour I spend every day traveling 7 miles to work in the bay area.
Significantly, less energy and time is lost in the suburbs. Plus, cities have ridiculous pricing for less space, hence people with families dislike cities (on average).
Are you kidding? It depends where you are in the suburbs I'm sure. However, in general because of the ease of transit with a car you have access to far more.
For example, in NYC I wouldn't have access to a soccer field, a place to go horse back ridding, a place to go off roading, fishing, a Macy's, an Steak house, McDonalds, a Red Lobster, etc. all within 10-15 minutes. All at the same time, having a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a yard at $1500/month.
> suburbs have less things spread out over much more area
Again, it is spread out over a larger area, but the accessibility of those regions is much greater (i.e. far less traffic, 45+ mph speed limit, and cheaper fuel costs). If you want stuff within walking distance, or public transit it will not be as accessible and thus you'll have access to less.
Living in the Bay Area (even with a car) it'll take me 25 minutes to get to the Costco 4 miles from my apartment which costs me 5x what it would in the suburbs of say Chicago, Austin, or countless other locations.
I'm not kidding. I am saying there are tradeoffs between suburban living and urban living. You give up a yard in the city. It is more expensive for far less space. However…
- I have Fishing, a Steakhouse, McDonalds, several seafood places better than Red Lobster within a 10-15 minute walk in NYC. Up until a few years ago, had horseback riding as well.
- If you expand this to a 10-15 minute subway ride, the selection gets insane.
So, no, you do not get access to more things in the suburbs, not by a lot. But as you said - you are closer to outdoorsy activities, have a yard, pay less.
If you're comparing the accessibility and cost of chain stores in and out of cities I'm going to assert that you're missing a lot of what cities have to offer (museums, interesting restaurants, live music, parks with lots of people in them, etc...). Also some people truly enjoy not needing to get into a car to accomplish even the most basic task
Cost of living and accessibility to nature and open space are the big compromises though
There's interesting restaurants in the (Chicago) suburbs too. They might not be as gimmicky (no "say the secret password to get in" types), but you can find just about every cuisine and the food is usually just as good.
Museums are great, but they're something I only get the urge to see a couple of times per year.
Live music (and you should have said shows/theatre also) is definitely lacking, but if I want to see that, I can drive an hour to go downtown or take the train to see them. Even when I was super gung-ho about going to those, I didn't go to more than a show per month. And several of those were in the suburbs (Ravinia, Oddball Comedy Festival, Chicago Improv, etc).
And parks? Except for the beach at Lake Michigan, the suburbs has the city beat in parks by a huge margin. Tons of forest preserves and parks out here, plenty to explore.
There's a lot more smaller but still enjoyable things in the suburbs too, community theatre, smaller concerts, sports events that don't cost a minimum of $80 per ticket, and town festivals which I prefer to big city events because you can actually walk without being constantly smushed by everyone else (literally true in Taste of Chicago).
But yeah, those don't want to use cars need not apply. And granted, there will be people who want to see a show 2 or 3 times per week and visit a museum at lunch every other day, who would of course prefer living in a big city. But it's not for everyone.
I'll agree the suburbs have less (if any) museums, live music, and parks with people in them.
What I would argue, that if someone from the suburbs wants to visit/participate in city events it's relatively easy (although getting home drunk or something would be difficult).
That's more-or-less the clear trade. You can't walk home drunk or visit these places without figuring out transportation, which often is less enjoyable.
I would like to say, I used to visit Greek Town, neighborhood festivities, or the Art Institute in Chicago pretty regularly and it took about an hour to and from the city on the weekends (I lived about 30 miles away). Living in the city, it took roughly the same time if you lived 2-3 miles away, but didn't use a car (the benefit being less responsibility)... So honestly, I see little difference in the cultural aspects.
I think this is how most American's see this as well. The cities are for the young who want to party, the suburbs are for the more established families wanting to raise children/relax.
If the only difference was the travel time, a 10x improvement in travel times would give you access to 100x more things, because we live on a two-dimensional surface. The reduction in density cuts down on that, but it's not 100x less dense.
Strongly disagree with your disagreement, why? Bay Area traffic is horrible because of the low density and poor street planning of the past, pushing people into cars.
Modern urban planners call it “induced demand” for traffic. [0] I recently saw a Planning Department presentation about one particular neighborhood of San Francisco (slides here [1], web site here [2]), and the key issue is that traffic is horrible because there are too many parking lots and transit is impractical. Even in San Francisco, neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset practically require you to have a car, especially if your daily routine deviates from doing home -> work downtown -> home.
Significantly more energy and time are lost in the suburbs. I’m concerned about long-term sustainability, and it takes tremendously less energy to walk 3 blocks to a grocery store than to drive 3 miles. For an extreme, outside the Bay Area, example, my grandmother moved to Tucson because she thought she could play with friends who live in Tucson, but then she discovered that Tucson is spread over 200 square miles, and she would have to drive an hour to reach her friend. They play much less than she expected.
Not to mention the vast expanses of roads and pipes necessary to keep the suburb working. I hear the bonds that are used to finance suburb infrastructure inherently require growth, in that without growth, they would be unable to afford the upkeep. I think this is behind so many crises about poor infrastructure maintenance across the US. [3]
Maybe you're a bit too use to focused on the Bay Area/San Fransisco.
> low density and poor street planning of the past
You're just wrong about San Fransisco's population density being low. It is 21st most populated place per square mile in the U.S.[1].
As for you're argument that there is "induced demand" for traffic I would argue that there needs to be actual evidence for that (not a wired article). The fact is, lots of lanes create slower traffic[2], and the "induced demand" argument would mean building a bridge to no-where would suddenly make people come (which seems pretty false).
Further, if you are concerned about:
> I’m concerned about long-term sustainability
Being more distributed reduces the need to transport water (arguably the single most important resource) vast distances. The same can be argued for energy; renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar farms are often built great distances from cities, you can place them closer to residence using them in suburbs.
Not to mention, suburbs eventually becoming cities (or as populated as such). Meaning I really wouldn't worry about this "long-term," at least 50 or so years.
Regardless, that's not really the point though. My argument was that the suburbs have access to at least just as much as a city, at a more affordable price.
I feel that you do not understand, not even the articles that you link to.
> You're just wrong about San Fransisco's population density being low. It is 21st most populated place per square mile in the U.S.
21st is far below 1st. Also, dividing by city is arbitrary and misleading, because a lot of traffic moves across the entire region. As a metropolitan area, San Francisco is 7th in the US, at only ⅓ the density of New York. And the density is even worse when you consider that it is unevenly distributed, and also when you compare to other metropolises around the world. It’s denser than the typical suburb, but it is still not dense enough. This low density contributes to the traffic problem.
I am going to ignore your ad hominem straw man about induced demand. I even linked to other sources that discuss the same issue. It’s not a marginal idea.
> Being more distributed reduces the need to transport water (arguably the single most important resource) vast distances.
Being distributed would reduce infrastructure if you didn’t have to connect them. If you draw your water from a cistern and flush your toilet into a septic tank, then you don’t need vast pipes. That is not suburbs. As far as I know, the typical suburb requires the centralized systems of a city, but uses more pumps and a lot more pipe per capita to bring the water to the residents. So much that the equipment just can’t be maintained using taxable revenue. [0] We need greater density to decrease per capita public expenses.
> Not to mention, suburbs eventually becoming cities (or as populated as such).
That doesn’t automatically happen. You have HOAs that fight to preserve some unrealistic ideal. You have NIMBYs who say growth should happen but it should not happen here. You have zoning laws that make it illegal to put jobs and grocery stores in walking distance of housing. We need to recognize that the suburban lifestyle is an unprecedented disaster, and work to undo that mistake.
> My argument was that the suburbs have access to at least just as much as a city, at a more affordable price.
My argument is that there are other considerations, agreeing with aaron695 that “very high density where people live is the most important thing ever.”
I also disagree with your numbers, and I could play soccer, go mountain biking, and go to one of a huge number of stores and restaurants in one day, without even leaving this city, because it’s not spread out over a vast area. As a bonus, I also avoid trampling the road with a multi-ton death machine and spewing noxious gases into the air I breathe, because I can do all that without driving.
“Affordable” is a weird issue. As SonjaKT has pointed out, the price of housing and the cost to produce it are not directly connected. The bigger issue is that suburbs are not sustainable.
Strongly disagree, why? In the suburbs you spend 10x less time in traffic, and have access to 10x more because it takes 15 minutes to go 10 miles vs the 1 hour I spend every day traveling 7 miles to work in the bay area.
Significantly, less energy and time is lost in the suburbs. Plus, cities have ridiculous pricing for less space, hence people with families dislike cities (on average).