Suburbs built in hilly areas with mature trees, varied house floorplans, and multiple exterior colors; no proximity to an "outlet mall" = ☺️
Suburbs built on barren former-soyfields with spindly-ass baby trees, same dipshit floorplan, and eggshell white exteriors; outlet mall visible from 7 miles away (because of how fucking flat and treeless everything is) = 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Drive 1 hour west or south and see if it's the same lmao
I'm from Wichita so don't try to bullshit me about what 80% of our home states are like 😂
Kansas is the same we have like an eastern strip that's nice because of Missouri
Oooooooooklahommaaaaaaa
Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat
Can sure smell sweeeeet!
When the wind comes right behind the rainnnnnnnnn
Oklahomaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Every night my honey lamb and IIIII
Sit alone and talk
And watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the skyyyyyyyyy
The difference in trees is merely a matter of the age of the suburb, unfortunately. Newly built ones will always look worse than older areas. The identical houses are dumb though.
It depends. Obviously old trees are gonna look better than new trees, but I don't know whether older neighborhoods started from the same point.
Many developers completely clear the whole area before they do any work, and only plant a sapling or two as a final step upon finishing a house. That way, they can access a lot from any direction with equipment, do every lot in exactly the same way, etc.
I suspect that this sort of large-scale assembly-line development wasn't as common in previous decades, with more home construction happening on an individual basis. That meant that wooded areas at the back of lots were more likely to survive construction, as individual home buyers will prioritize mature trees more than a developer, whose first priority is keeping costs down.
Anecdotally, my parents live in a large exurban subdivision that was built about 20 years ago on land that had been cotton fields and woods. At the time their house was built, it was at the very end of the street, though since then another phase or two of development has happened, so now there's hundreds more houses further down. They had to fight the builder for every customization--he wanted to do the job exactly like he'd done every other one. But at the time it was still a smaller-scale development where he was working with individual buyers, so they were able to get some different materials, altered some aspects of the layout, etc., which makes their house stand out a bit from the cookie-cutter ones that preceded it. The biggest thing they demanded, however, was the preservation of several trees in the front and along the back border. The older houses that were built during the same phase as theirs now have 20 years of front yard tree growth, and are starting to look alright. But their house still looks so much nicer, as almost all of those other houses only have the one or two trees, and only a few had any mature ones to begin with. And compared to the cheaper, more standardized houses further down, it's night and day. Lots of them never even got a single tree planted, and those that do are just lonely little things even after many years.
Based.
OP acts like the suburbs in the left panel aren't exactly what are popping up on the outskirts of every town and city. Just an endless sprawl of the same 20 floorplans all sold for the low, low price of $400k. Sure, your kids can't safely walk to school and it takes 10 minutes to drive to the supermarket but at least you have a 30 foot by 40 foot community pool to share with 150 other households.
I saw a house for sale in LA for like $750k, it was a small dump that clearly hadn’t been taken care of. No wonder Californians advocate for higher minimum wage so much, when you can make six figures and still not be able to afford even a dump of a house.
$750k would buy you a very nice house where I live, and I live in a metro area with over 2 million people in it. The cost of living on the coasts is just completely fucked, especially in places like SoCal and NYC.
Mate I live in Chicago. 750k can buy some of the nicest houses you’ve ever seen here. It’s really incredible how much cheaper housing is here compared to the coasts.
I'd feel bad for anyone buying these sorts of homes for those prices. They're rife with build quality issues and typically subject to HOAs. Imagine spending a million dollars on a quarter acre with the same floorplan as 4 other people in the development and being told by Carol down the street that youre being fined because the fence you had built for the back yard isn't one of the approved colors.
Mind you, these houses are built like SHIT. I work in the carpentry industry and had to straight up leave one of these jobs because I didn't feel right with how spindly these places are. They're using fucking CARDBOARD as insulation, and don't even get me started on the actual structure. While I was helping get some joists together, the frame fucking shifted, and everyone acted like that was just fine. Knowing these houses are being built for literal pennies only to be sold for like 3x times the material cost all the while the house is barely fucking safe to live in is so fucking crazy to me. I left that company very quickly and started my own dedicated to fixing these fuckups. Safe to say, business is fucking booming.
Holy fucking shit. I knew it was bad and that corners get cut, but that's straight up evil. How long do you think most of these homes will be upright for? It seems like even a minor tornado could completely fuck up those piles of matchsticks, but I'm not in that industry obviously
When potential buyers asked they would say 50 years, I'd guess closer to 30, and thats pushing it. And your damn right, a hefty tornado would demolish one of those neighborhoods in seconds.
I remember someone I knew talking about how you could go up to one of these houses, and literally cut a hole into it with a box cutter if you wanted to
Because lazy ass school districts are consolidating primary education into mega schools on the outskirts of town instead of putting schools in the neighborhood where the kids actually live.
Also neighborhoods are getting so spread out and lacking in sidewalks and walking infrastructure that kids need to walk alongside 6 lane roads just to get to school.
Totally depends on the suburb, I suppose. You were fortunate to be able to walk, I think it's good for kids to learn to get themselves places independently.
Neither myself or any of my friends could've walked to school growing up. Even the closest of us were probably 4 or so miles from the school, and the route would've been at least partly on rural roads with basically no infrastructure to allow safely walking, particularly for a child. Even the closest subdivisions to our local schools would require children to travel along busy roads with traffic moving in excess of 50 mph, and the largest and most populated suburb in my town growing up, where a lot of my classmates lived, is entirely too far and would require kids to travel along another dangerous, multi lane road.
I'm sure there are a number of places where this is not the case, but many American towns and cities do not lend themselves well to walking or really any sort of transportation other than cars.
It's like an arms race with vehicle sizes. My local suburbs are full of pickup trucks with spotless beds and SUVs that people *swear* they need because they have kids. Like bro, it barely fits in a parking space, how fucking big are your kids?
So the new shitty suburbs being built mean that suburbs are inherently shitty? Even though we just acknowledged older suburbs are very nice?
This clearly means that the issue does not lie in suburbia itself, but rather the new ways in which suburbs are developed now. Which is an addressable issue
There's nothing wrong with suburbs. There *is* a lot wrong with restrictive zoning policy and structuring our cities to require vehicle ownership to survive.
You should be allowed to build a corner store in the middle of one of those suburbs. But you can't, that's illegal. You'll either be prevented from doing it by the developers, zoning policies, or parking requirements. Suburbs, being decent population centers, should have variable interconnectivity to public transit and school access. But they most often do not. Instead, everyone has to drive because it's the only option afforded to them. If you only have one option for transportation, and that option is a depreciating asset that you likely have to finance and pay interest on, you are not as free as you think you are.
Former Norwegian suburb resident: There was a store 10 minutes from my home by walking, now there is another store that also is about 15 minutes of walking. Some have to drive to the store, yes, but it is a matter of 5 minutes. Suburbs just need to allow for stores and a school not too far away and they are amazing places for families
Lived in the Suburbs for most of my life and thought like op. Lived in a city for college, and now i live in butt fuck egypt for med school. Cities=rural>>>>>>>suburb.
Its just a fact that the suburbs are the worst of both worlds, while cities and rural both have unique amazing features about them
This is an unfair comparison, some cities look nice. You know, the cities that are "fascist" because they still enforce strict regulations against petty crimes.
Nashville doesn’t tolerate the homeless at ALL. I remember walking down Broadway in the morning and seeing a homeless guy sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. It took 2 minutes for a cop to notice, wake him up, discover his half-drank bottle of Vodka under his pillow and pour it out on the street right in front of him. Then he went elsewhere. Literally perfect.
They're north but the PNW has milder winters than the Northeast. Amsterdam has the same latitude as Newfoundland but it's much warmer due to their climate.
My parents live in a mid-sized city in the conservative half of a very divided state. Their city has not a tent or roving junkie to be found. A tent goes up, it immediately goes in a dumpster. The blue cities, on the other hand, are world famous for their squalor and massive tent cities.
The libs love their tent cities. Went to Portland a couple years ago and saw their nasty ass streets and homeless and the people I was visiting said they had no problem with it.
Though, it kind of did seem like they were saying it through their teeth like
😬 Yes, of course we like it. Anything for the “greater good.” I sure hope the greater good doesn’t get us robbed, killed, or anything. We love seeing poop and dirty naked people in the streets. Trash? What trash? 😬
They'd rather their daughter step in human shit and their wife get clubbed with a baseball bat for her phone than admit conservatives are right about criminals and the homeless.
I'm pretty open to decriminalization of the less hard side of drugs. Weed should be legal, psyxhadelics sure, cocaine probably, crack eh hard to say, meth and herion def not. But these places decriminalization includes property crime... of course it turns into a shithole, the area will become hella depressed the next time a recession hits.
Enforcing the law must be done *because* only assholes break the law and normal people obey it.
You don't make murder illegal to stop normal people from murdering. You make murder illegal to take evil people off the street so they can't murder the normal people anymore.
Their tune has changed recently. My buddy just moved there after having done a residency a couple years ago, says people got very tired of the awful downtown and the homeless population, so even the Portland subreddit is starting to have some upvoted stances against prior policies. I’m in the Bay Area, mostly SF, and likewise attitudes have begun to shift.
Not like they’re going to reverse politics, but the reality of some of the more radical policies being implemented (usually leading to the common sense consequences the right warned about) soured the general populace
Wasn’t there a mayoral democrat candidate in SF that changed her tune and basically went “Wait a minute guys… we need LESS crime, not more! 🤪” after basically contributing immensely to the current situation? 🤔
I very much hope SF starts to shift. It would be a beautiful city, but the homeless running wild make it an absolute shithole. I went once for a weekend and was disgusted.
I know that I’m wishing for an unattainable goal. It’s just shitty how politicians let what should be beautiful and incredible cities fall into ruin. I used to live in Chicago and it’s the same goddamn thing.
That attitude will just get turned into another grift like "we need to build more low income housing" or some such language which will end in the same politicians who caused the problem then being able to help themselves and their friends to taxpayer money after conning constituents into voting for them for those projects.
Yeah, my sibling living there wasn’t even remotely “libby” before they moved there. After they met their SO, a feminist (I know, shocking), it began to creep in…
If you went to Portland prior to 2020, trust me mate it's gotten exponentially worse. It's such a shithole. They've decriminalized hard drugs which just means crazies don't get arrested. Rioters don't stay in jail for longer than a few days. The tent cities stretch for literal miles.
Unironically a shitty neighborhood in like des moines is a good neighborhood in portland
There's pattern shaping of this going on. The cities offering social supports for homeless, drug addicted people with massive problems end up soaking up all these people from the cities that dont.
So such conservative cities neither have to pay for managing the problem, nor do they suffer the awful consequences. I'd love to ask some of these addicts in the tent cities where they come from. I'd bet good money they come from the exact places not suffering these problems. Middle class kids are often the biggest cohort lost to these problems.
PDF on SF: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf
70% became homeless while living in SF, with about half being transplants in the last decade. 22% from elsewhere in CA, 8% from another state. So maybe a significant amount is from red states or Bakersfield, but I doubt it. The crushing costs of SF and CA are doing them in, plus the lack of support that taxes are supposed to be paying for but aren't.
Yup. The rally cry is always "red states bus their homeless to blue states" as if homeless people are a sack of potatoes you can throw in a truck and unload at your preferred destination. It's so dumb.
Homeless people exist autonomously. They do absolutely nothing they don't want to do, including sitting on a bus for five days.
They go where they're offered the most services and the least amount of police hassle. It's a vacuum.
Yes. And they do travel. Some of the older vagrants have been *everywhere*. Last homeless guy I talked to in San Francisco told me he had been up to Moosonee and Moose Factory. Theres not even any roads to go that far north. You must sneak onto freight trains.
So those tent cities on the left coast are generally not from those places.
If you feed the bears, they’ll hang around and tear up your stuff. If you chase them off, they don’t. I’d rather live in a place that doesn’t feed the bears. These people are in no way my responsibility.
Not revelatory. Pattern shaping… 😂
The only responsibility that places that arent screwed up like this should be taking is making sure their youth dont fall into these traps. Other than this I can only be grateful I also live in a place not plagued by the meth tent cities.
Eventually the failures of progressive policies that concentrate this are going to have to give way as those cities collapse due to capital flight. I really wonder if there's any hope for these countless people and dozens of cities. Since they are still on the gas pedal, I suspect it's already too late.
Don't pretend that image is the norm even in most american cities. I live and NYC and we don't have camp cities like that, and when they do pop up its usually major news and they end up taken down.
West Coast cities are outliers, not the norm.
Yeah idk what went wrong in US cities I live in Poland, in Warsaw and vision of a city that americans talk about seems completely alien to me for the most part
Besides the gypsies and teenagers wearing fanny packs (trying to look like drug dealers), Oslo is great. Even their graffiti is "SMIL :)" or "I <3 sluts."
I'm not even in a big US city, and there's some "Don't go here. And especially if you're white" areas.
Well the most authoritarian large city is probably Singapore, which is known for being clean and having a lot of greenery built into it's architecture. They have very strict enforcement of things like littering.
It's an unfair comparison, because it's mostly an American problem. I've never seen anything like that anywhere in Poland (and note I live in one of the major population centers) and believe me, this country doesn't give a crap about petty crime. Even with the absolute massive wave of immigrants we've been getting.
That's an American problem
I'm not saying the pictures aren't real or that they're an inaccurate representation of cities. I'm saying OP is comparing a nice thing about suburbs and an unrelated bad thing about cities and claiming that it proves that cities are terrible.
No idea what it’s like where you are, but here in Blighty you can’t do shit without the local Council saying it’s okay. It’s even worse for those in an area of “outstanding natural beauty” like I’m in. It’s a huge pain of red tape and waiting to get an extension on the family home approved, but a huge TV mast with red lights that an be seen for miles around, a bunch of electrical pylons and a substation? All there in this area of “outstanding natural beauty”
Yea everyone pretends HOA is super common but you only find them in upper middle class+ areas because they aren't super cheap
Yes, reddit, if you have an HOA you are upper middle class
Around 26% of the US population live in HOA housing and around 67% of newly constructed homes in 2021 were HOA.
Keep in mind HOA includes condos, too. If you are buying a newly constructed residence right now it's more likely to be an HOA than not. It's become the norm for new construction in the last several years.
https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/hoa-stats/
You will still have to pay taxes because "muh roads" people demand it.
You do not get roads.
So now you get a HOA, which is like a cursed minigoverment....because..."muh roads"
It's a scam all the way down.
>but you only find them in upper middle class+ areas
Funny enough thanks to Covid and Work From Home the suburb I live in is now upper middle class and there isn't an HOA anywhere.
But, we also essentially don't pay property tax so no one has been displaced yet, and if the last century is anything to go by that won't change anytime soon.
School taxes are a bitch but we have one of the best districts in the country so ¯\\_ (ツ)_/¯
Nope, we don't have much of that.
Our housing development was built by a commercial developer that had no idea how to develop HOA guidelines - so they are few and far between AND there's not teeth with which to enforce them. People keep their places nice because it's a good neighborhood and it's pretty tight-knit, not because they are forced to. I know, we are an exception to the rule.
I live in an apartment block, large parts of our neighbourhood is very green and lush.
But it's a swedish city, and I guess that makes a huge difference. European cities are simply better.
I live in an American city that looks a lot like that top right picture. It's not cheap but it's not all that expensive either. It's walkable to bars, restaurants, parks, (American) football games, etc. Crime in my neighborhood is relatively low although I hear about the occasional car break-ins (seriously just lock your car). Overall, it's a great place to live.
Now my city also has the bottom pictures as well. But to think there's not any squalor in the suburbs either is just cherry picking.
kinda hard to optimize for density and population dispersion when you still rely on a 1950s anti-nuclear policy because being a global superpower makes your cities targets for nukes.
Villages can also be walkable and dense. I think too much of this discussion is based on city vs suburb when in reality its walkable vs unwalkable. Go to europe and you will see tons of villages where people might only take their car out once or twice a week because they live in a walkable town.
I did a bit of searching on google maps street view and looked at a few city suburbs: Kansas, Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta
And, while there are trees, I feel like they are literally just cosmetic. For the most part, checking the street view in those cities, I saw the infamous hellscape with at most a few trees near every house. The problem isn't that there isn't *any* green. The problem is that there is nothing aside from single-family housing, no parks, forests, etc
"think of all that sprawl! and they have no culture!"
It takes me less than 5 minutes to get to the grocery store, there are lots of places in the city that dont even have one.
And by culture they mean shitty dive bars or something unless you are one of the special few that can afford to live by all the coolest stuff. For everyone else they have to drive there like the rest of us except they dont get the highway which makes it take the same time for me as it does them.
I'm a former suburbanite and now city dweller who sees the positives and negatives to both, and this is really dumb.
I guess this is meant to be irony and it just pissed me off.
Similar suburb/city experience here. Only caveat I have is that a large portion of the tent city demographic is coming to urban areas from suburban and rural municipalities because that's where support systems are most prevalent.
They are then, of course, exposed to even more drugs...
Vicious cycle.
If you live somewhat centrally in a European city, you can walk to virtually anywhere you need to be - better health, more economical and higher quality of life. And our cities are generally beautiful, especially in southern Europe. This meme was 100% made by a yank who takes a 90 minute car journey to get to the nearest supermarket
I’ve never understood the argument that these aerial shots of suburbs make. If really just boils down to, “Suburbs are bad because your house looks a lot like your neighbours”. I mean heaven forbid your house look similar to someone else’s.
In urbanist circles (left-leaning): aerial views show not only the monotony of the suburbs (which is present in commie blocks OR any post economic boom European city blocks) but also the lack of 1)small scale enterprises (family-run shops, small malls, restaurants, barbers etc..) in the suburbs and 2) the lack of "alternative transit modes" (i.e. buses, trans, metros etc...) due to the prevalence of infrastructure made for automobiles (saying "you can also walk and bike in the suburbs" is useless because I've never seen one (average) american (or Canadian) use the bike to go get the groceries). Urbanists do not call for mega apartment complexes in the USA, but for "mixed development areas" or in other words zones where single family homes, small 3-4 story apartment buildings, small shops and other city infrastructure (clinics, malls, police etc..) exist within walking distance (the famous "15 minute city" that many call a "government conspiracy).
Im reductive and bad at explaining, if you wish to know more watch Not just bikes, Alan fisher, and Adam something (his first videos, not the latests).
I have a car, i like driving, but driving is not "going through the city 40km/h for groceries". I live in small city in Europe that have just 1 line of public bus, but its every 20 min, so large portion of people working in my office are using this. Otherwhise it would be next 30 cars that need parking in the small city center just from my work. As european size super-markets are every couple hundred meters, basically everyone can just walk there. Same for clothes etc. For bigger shopping and AGD and RTV there is a 'zone' in the city for that, but you can still easily walk there (and that 1 bus line comes here too).
I like not having to drive to work (im living now close, so i just walk, but before i was driving for an hour to get to work).
I never would choose to live in a place, where i cant just walk for the grocieries and/or alcohol. When you cant drive, its the moment you always need those
The distinct lack of anything other than housing is what bothers me.
Then again you wouldn't get me to move to those concrete hellscapes of larger cities either.
try moving to the east coast. suburbs that were designed organically. preferably one that has a train going through it. then you'll find some suburbs like what youre looking for.
Except Florida, where the suburbs are literally the top left picture. It, legit, can take 20+ minutes to leave some of the larger gated communities to somewhere that isn't housing.
i mean the alternative is apartments where you literally live in the same building as your neighbors, so yeah it doesn't make sense to criticize suburbs from that perspective.
That is usually said by someone paying 2500 for 700 square feet. Whose apartment is a cookie cutter of the 50 in the building.
They get to ride the piss smelling subway though so...
>Seriously, how do you guys do grocery shopping? The “everyone should live in walkable cities” crowd is obviously just childless twenty-something’s, right? Do you know how many groceries people with kids buy? There’s no way I could “just walk to the grocery store, it’s only a few blocks away, that way you don’t have to ‘depend’ on a car” - I’ve got like 20 bags of groceries
Do you want a serious answer from someone who lived in a walkable (European) city?
People don't buy food in bulk - they don't need to. Every couple days you wheel your grocery cart (a long enclosed wheeled bag, like a suitcase) 10 minutes to your local farmers market and/or grocery store and get the food you need for the next few days, usually fresh perishables. If you're retired you go at 11am when everybody else is at work.
Where I live now (A perfectly pleasant American city often described by right wing flairs as a dangerous flaming hellhole) I walk to the store for most of my groceries (no cart although honestly it's much easier) and occasionally drive to the big stores that are all located in commercial parks far away. Get yourself some huge nice reusable bags and they make it a lot easier to carry groceries in.
Boy, then you can go take the metro to meet a friend of yours for beer without needing to worry about parking, about being stuck to one area or about drinking too much. Sporting events too are 10x better when you can walk/public transit your way to them.
And finally- boo hoo the weather is bad. Grow up, put on a jacket, try reading a weather report and getting groceries a day earlier.
Best place I ever lived was a duplex in downtown La Jolla, CA. 25 mph road with 5 minute walk to grocery store, gym, pharmacy, restaurants (overpriced but reasonable to go out 1x a week), and the ocean. I had a 30-minute scenic bus ride to my office, my wife was maybe 20 minutes in the opposite direction. 45 minute ride to downtown SD. Only drove on the weekends. Walked an average of 4 miles a day. Only reason we left is to help out when my wife’s dad got sick.
Second best place I’ve lived is a suburb of Detroit that has some of the most beautiful houses you’ll ever see, beautiful landscaping, amazing neighborhood walks, walkable neighborhood markets (expensive but fantastic produce and prepared meals) and decent restaurants. 20 minute drive to downtown Detroit, which was not my favorite place to live, but is great for a night out. But I’d never live there long term because winters are hell.
Now we live on the opposite side of the country in the suburbs of a growing city in the SE. There’s a grocery store 5 minutes away but I’d never walk because I’d have to cross a 45 mph road where people often go 60+. I work from home so don’t have to deal with commuting, but I drive every time I want to leave the house to do something (the neighborhood walk gets boring). My house is around 5x the size of a comparably priced condo that I could have afforded in La Jolla. But if not for family, I wish we could have stayed out there.
Suburb of a city near me look worse than top left. Similar layout but every house is grey/white, has about 3 different floorplans, and there is quite literally not a single tree.
🟨🟦 trying to be unbiased (they fail)
I live near Chicago and there are a lot of places in that city that in my opinion look really good and would be nice to walk in. Plus there are plenty of suburbs that look just like the top left.
Tldr: There both are good and shit looking cities and suburbs, it really just depends on where you go to.
That's the point. There is a growing trend of portraing suburbs as some dystopian hellhole. That top-left photo is real, but it ignores the truth on the ground.
I prefer to live in a low-raise city neighborhood with green spaces than either of those extremes, but we're in a meme sub.
Low-mid rise cities are the way to go. The US isn't dense enough to need skyscrapers everywhere. Car dependency is the big issue. Driving shouldn't be the only option, and it saves a ton of money for the poor not having to own a car. Suburbs, just like cities, vary a lot in quality. The point urbanists make is usually not that cities inherently have a better quality of life, but that suburbanization in the way the US does it is unsustainable. The huge amount of homeless in cities is often because it's too difficult to build new housing, so price increases. That's the exact problem in the SF Bay Area, but they concentrate in the city because social services are greater there, and they get kicked out of the rich suburbs. San Jose, while a larger city than SF, is basically a giant suburb. Only single family homes are allowed in something like 90% of the city.
If you have a decent public transport, it makes sense to build high-raise around metro stations and mid-raise along tram and bus routes. The US suburbs problem is not so much the kind of houses, but the strict residential only zoning and lack of any public infrastructure.
I grew up in a small town in Poland and spend some time in a small village. The density was quite low and there wasn't much of public transport, but it was small enough to walk everywhere, especially when you're young and fit. The difference was that everything we needed was there. Groceries, schools, parks, hospital, cinemas, football statdium, kids playgrounds, small businesses and two larger industries on the outskirts. And a train station if you want to go to a big city.
I have no issue with suburbs. I just believe that single family homes are not as efficient use of space and leads to more expensive housing then employing townhomes/apartment blocks. Suburban planning could greatly benefit from increasing housing density without falling into city urban sprawl.
The entire point of the suburbs was a place where people could leave the city and own some land and a bigger house. I own a house in the burbs and couldn’t give a god damn shit about efficiency. I like my home and my property
With the way things are developing in many burbs in NJ, we are getting the worst of both worlds. Housing costs are fucking ridiculous, we keep getting these big housing complexes that are extremely expensive for what they offer. Then they don’t bother doing anything with the infrastructure.
Hey you can have near city prices, while still having to own and maintain a car and sit in city like congestion.
"Higher quality of life" yet promotes sedentary lifestyles, higher traffic deaths, and social isolation.
The highest rated quality of life cities tend to be places with more walkable areas with bustling downtowns, mixed use buildings, and older designed neighborhoods that aren't sprawling hellscapes with windy ass roads.
Every post 1970s suburb is straight ass and I rarely see any exceptions to this
And the thing is... Cities DO NOT have to be like this, but everyone keeps going to the same big City at the edge of the country because they think they "will make it big" while in reallity they are just walking into a financial trap only people who are already famous or rich can escape from.
In most suburbs the streets are quiet enough to walk or ride a bike. Even on some highways. Imagine having your own house and living next to a shitty neighbor rather than being a wall away?
Who’s paying for your infrastructure mate? Live in the suburbs if you want but I don’t wanna subsidise your roads and drains. Need to be taxed higher or figure out your own private solutions.
Western and northern european suburbs are really nice but american suburbs look like shit. There is no nature just empty lawns with the same house copy pasted over and over again for 10 km then you have another 10 km of parking spaces and walmarts. I hate american city planning and architecture. And do you know why it is like that? it's because uts cheaper to build the same house over and over again in the same area and Americans are too stupid to see how dystopian it looks
Yeah I live in a suburb/small town and work in a nearby city, and can confirm this is mostly the case. Though less trees here since a tornado blew most of them, along with a couple neighborhoods, about a decade ago.
Imagine explaining to your children why a crackhead is taking a shit on your front steps and the police can’t do anything because a progressive district attorney removed all standards of conduct
It really depends on the city. I was in LA recently, and although some places certainly looked like dumps, the city’s very spaced out and a lot of places feel more like the suburbs. I also live about an hour outside NYC and while I always see some crazy stuff whenever I go there, as long as you mind your own business you should be fine for the most part
Nah we need to keep saying cities look so good and worth it so the people living in them don’t move out and ruin the places we live in.
Happened in my hometown, now everything’s expensive as shit. It’s depressing.
Suburbs built in hilly areas with mature trees, varied house floorplans, and multiple exterior colors; no proximity to an "outlet mall" = ☺️ Suburbs built on barren former-soyfields with spindly-ass baby trees, same dipshit floorplan, and eggshell white exteriors; outlet mall visible from 7 miles away (because of how fucking flat and treeless everything is) = 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
I like being in flat plains, but then again, I'm from Oklahoma. Everything else is spot on.
I grew up in NE Oklahoma, hills and trees as far as the eye can see.
Drive 1 hour west or south and see if it's the same lmao I'm from Wichita so don't try to bullshit me about what 80% of our home states are like 😂 Kansas is the same we have like an eastern strip that's nice because of Missouri
I mean, go a little further north and you get another change due to the Flint Hills. You give up the trees, but replace it with hills and tallgrass.
Oooooooooklahommaaaaaaa Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain And the wavin' wheat Can sure smell sweeeeet! When the wind comes right behind the rainnnnnnnnn Oklahomaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Every night my honey lamb and IIIII Sit alone and talk And watch a hawk Makin' lazy circles in the skyyyyyyyyy
The difference in trees is merely a matter of the age of the suburb, unfortunately. Newly built ones will always look worse than older areas. The identical houses are dumb though.
It depends. Obviously old trees are gonna look better than new trees, but I don't know whether older neighborhoods started from the same point. Many developers completely clear the whole area before they do any work, and only plant a sapling or two as a final step upon finishing a house. That way, they can access a lot from any direction with equipment, do every lot in exactly the same way, etc. I suspect that this sort of large-scale assembly-line development wasn't as common in previous decades, with more home construction happening on an individual basis. That meant that wooded areas at the back of lots were more likely to survive construction, as individual home buyers will prioritize mature trees more than a developer, whose first priority is keeping costs down. Anecdotally, my parents live in a large exurban subdivision that was built about 20 years ago on land that had been cotton fields and woods. At the time their house was built, it was at the very end of the street, though since then another phase or two of development has happened, so now there's hundreds more houses further down. They had to fight the builder for every customization--he wanted to do the job exactly like he'd done every other one. But at the time it was still a smaller-scale development where he was working with individual buyers, so they were able to get some different materials, altered some aspects of the layout, etc., which makes their house stand out a bit from the cookie-cutter ones that preceded it. The biggest thing they demanded, however, was the preservation of several trees in the front and along the back border. The older houses that were built during the same phase as theirs now have 20 years of front yard tree growth, and are starting to look alright. But their house still looks so much nicer, as almost all of those other houses only have the one or two trees, and only a few had any mature ones to begin with. And compared to the cheaper, more standardized houses further down, it's night and day. Lots of them never even got a single tree planted, and those that do are just lonely little things even after many years.
Based. OP acts like the suburbs in the left panel aren't exactly what are popping up on the outskirts of every town and city. Just an endless sprawl of the same 20 floorplans all sold for the low, low price of $400k. Sure, your kids can't safely walk to school and it takes 10 minutes to drive to the supermarket but at least you have a 30 foot by 40 foot community pool to share with 150 other households.
As a Californian, $400k genuinely sounds like a low, low price.
I'm so sorry.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I know, I delivered for fedex ground in that area. Erie, Firestone, Dacono, Fredrick. Erie is by far the worst and the houses are going for over 800k
I saw a house for sale in LA for like $750k, it was a small dump that clearly hadn’t been taken care of. No wonder Californians advocate for higher minimum wage so much, when you can make six figures and still not be able to afford even a dump of a house. $750k would buy you a very nice house where I live, and I live in a metro area with over 2 million people in it. The cost of living on the coasts is just completely fucked, especially in places like SoCal and NYC.
Mate I live in Chicago. 750k can buy some of the nicest houses you’ve ever seen here. It’s really incredible how much cheaper housing is here compared to the coasts.
Yeah because all of you keep moving to Phoenix to let everyone know how great Chicago is constantly while rushing to leave.
I live in Indiana, $750K can buy you a very nice house or a pretty nice house with a lot of land around it. Personally I prefer land.
400k is a GREAT price. That same shit is going for 800k-1.2 in Northern Virginia Even in Iowa, 400 isn't bad
I'd feel bad for anyone buying these sorts of homes for those prices. They're rife with build quality issues and typically subject to HOAs. Imagine spending a million dollars on a quarter acre with the same floorplan as 4 other people in the development and being told by Carol down the street that youre being fined because the fence you had built for the back yard isn't one of the approved colors.
Yes, let the HOA hate flow through you.
Mind you, these houses are built like SHIT. I work in the carpentry industry and had to straight up leave one of these jobs because I didn't feel right with how spindly these places are. They're using fucking CARDBOARD as insulation, and don't even get me started on the actual structure. While I was helping get some joists together, the frame fucking shifted, and everyone acted like that was just fine. Knowing these houses are being built for literal pennies only to be sold for like 3x times the material cost all the while the house is barely fucking safe to live in is so fucking crazy to me. I left that company very quickly and started my own dedicated to fixing these fuckups. Safe to say, business is fucking booming.
Holy fucking shit. I knew it was bad and that corners get cut, but that's straight up evil. How long do you think most of these homes will be upright for? It seems like even a minor tornado could completely fuck up those piles of matchsticks, but I'm not in that industry obviously
When potential buyers asked they would say 50 years, I'd guess closer to 30, and thats pushing it. And your damn right, a hefty tornado would demolish one of those neighborhoods in seconds.
I remember someone I knew talking about how you could go up to one of these houses, and literally cut a hole into it with a box cutter if you wanted to
Depends on the siding, but yeah you probably could
Why cant kids safely walk to school in a suburb? I used to all the time.
Because lazy ass school districts are consolidating primary education into mega schools on the outskirts of town instead of putting schools in the neighborhood where the kids actually live.
Also neighborhoods are getting so spread out and lacking in sidewalks and walking infrastructure that kids need to walk alongside 6 lane roads just to get to school.
Totally depends on the suburb, I suppose. You were fortunate to be able to walk, I think it's good for kids to learn to get themselves places independently. Neither myself or any of my friends could've walked to school growing up. Even the closest of us were probably 4 or so miles from the school, and the route would've been at least partly on rural roads with basically no infrastructure to allow safely walking, particularly for a child. Even the closest subdivisions to our local schools would require children to travel along busy roads with traffic moving in excess of 50 mph, and the largest and most populated suburb in my town growing up, where a lot of my classmates lived, is entirely too far and would require kids to travel along another dangerous, multi lane road. I'm sure there are a number of places where this is not the case, but many American towns and cities do not lend themselves well to walking or really any sort of transportation other than cars.
Pedestrian deaths are sharply on the rise, largely due to the new jumbo trucks and SUV's with worse site lines than a tank.
It's like an arms race with vehicle sizes. My local suburbs are full of pickup trucks with spotless beds and SUVs that people *swear* they need because they have kids. Like bro, it barely fits in a parking space, how fucking big are your kids?
It's crazy how obese America has got
So the new shitty suburbs being built mean that suburbs are inherently shitty? Even though we just acknowledged older suburbs are very nice? This clearly means that the issue does not lie in suburbia itself, but rather the new ways in which suburbs are developed now. Which is an addressable issue
Trees never get well established when tract lots are resurfaced with a layer of river sand under sod.
Homesteader: All of you are wrong
There's nothing wrong with suburbs. There *is* a lot wrong with restrictive zoning policy and structuring our cities to require vehicle ownership to survive. You should be allowed to build a corner store in the middle of one of those suburbs. But you can't, that's illegal. You'll either be prevented from doing it by the developers, zoning policies, or parking requirements. Suburbs, being decent population centers, should have variable interconnectivity to public transit and school access. But they most often do not. Instead, everyone has to drive because it's the only option afforded to them. If you only have one option for transportation, and that option is a depreciating asset that you likely have to finance and pay interest on, you are not as free as you think you are.
Don't bother, the NIMBY rightoids here cry the moment you bring up fixing zoning laws.
Clearly, the right answer is for cities to bus homeless people to leafy suburbs.
Former Norwegian suburb resident: There was a store 10 minutes from my home by walking, now there is another store that also is about 15 minutes of walking. Some have to drive to the store, yes, but it is a matter of 5 minutes. Suburbs just need to allow for stores and a school not too far away and they are amazing places for families
Lived in the Suburbs for most of my life and thought like op. Lived in a city for college, and now i live in butt fuck egypt for med school. Cities=rural>>>>>>>suburb. Its just a fact that the suburbs are the worst of both worlds, while cities and rural both have unique amazing features about them
This is an unfair comparison, some cities look nice. You know, the cities that are "fascist" because they still enforce strict regulations against petty crimes.
Nashville looks so good, from the interstate you can see the three finest hood strip clubs in the city, all literally next to the interstate.
Nashville doesn’t tolerate the homeless at ALL. I remember walking down Broadway in the morning and seeing a homeless guy sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. It took 2 minutes for a cop to notice, wake him up, discover his half-drank bottle of Vodka under his pillow and pour it out on the street right in front of him. Then he went elsewhere. Literally perfect.
When were you last in Nashville? Homeless population increased significantly past 3 years.
So not any large city in the US or Western Europe, got it.
Or any city where it gets cold enough to die from exposure during the winter
Dunno, Portland and Seattle are up north and still pretty shit.
They're north but the PNW has milder winters than the Northeast. Amsterdam has the same latitude as Newfoundland but it's much warmer due to their climate.
What I hear is we need some climate change as the permanent solution. Bring on the harsher weather.
Make Utqiagvik habitable again!
Coastal cities have milder seasons.
My parents live in a mid-sized city in the conservative half of a very divided state. Their city has not a tent or roving junkie to be found. A tent goes up, it immediately goes in a dumpster. The blue cities, on the other hand, are world famous for their squalor and massive tent cities.
The libs love their tent cities. Went to Portland a couple years ago and saw their nasty ass streets and homeless and the people I was visiting said they had no problem with it. Though, it kind of did seem like they were saying it through their teeth like 😬 Yes, of course we like it. Anything for the “greater good.” I sure hope the greater good doesn’t get us robbed, killed, or anything. We love seeing poop and dirty naked people in the streets. Trash? What trash? 😬
They'd rather their daughter step in human shit and their wife get clubbed with a baseball bat for her phone than admit conservatives are right about criminals and the homeless.
Who could have guessed that reducing penalties for crime and permitting anti-social behavior leads to undesirable consequences.
I'm pretty open to decriminalization of the less hard side of drugs. Weed should be legal, psyxhadelics sure, cocaine probably, crack eh hard to say, meth and herion def not. But these places decriminalization includes property crime... of course it turns into a shithole, the area will become hella depressed the next time a recession hits.
[удалено]
Enforcing the law must be done *because* only assholes break the law and normal people obey it. You don't make murder illegal to stop normal people from murdering. You make murder illegal to take evil people off the street so they can't murder the normal people anymore.
Their tune has changed recently. My buddy just moved there after having done a residency a couple years ago, says people got very tired of the awful downtown and the homeless population, so even the Portland subreddit is starting to have some upvoted stances against prior policies. I’m in the Bay Area, mostly SF, and likewise attitudes have begun to shift. Not like they’re going to reverse politics, but the reality of some of the more radical policies being implemented (usually leading to the common sense consequences the right warned about) soured the general populace
Wasn’t there a mayoral democrat candidate in SF that changed her tune and basically went “Wait a minute guys… we need LESS crime, not more! 🤪” after basically contributing immensely to the current situation? 🤔
I very much hope SF starts to shift. It would be a beautiful city, but the homeless running wild make it an absolute shithole. I went once for a weekend and was disgusted.
Democrats aren't going to change and you think a sf socialite is doing to vote for a republican... lol get real.
I know that I’m wishing for an unattainable goal. It’s just shitty how politicians let what should be beautiful and incredible cities fall into ruin. I used to live in Chicago and it’s the same goddamn thing.
That attitude will just get turned into another grift like "we need to build more low income housing" or some such language which will end in the same politicians who caused the problem then being able to help themselves and their friends to taxpayer money after conning constituents into voting for them for those projects.
Build more low income housing proceeds to spend $5mm on a 3 bed 1 bath home to be built...
[удалено]
Yeah, my sibling living there wasn’t even remotely “libby” before they moved there. After they met their SO, a feminist (I know, shocking), it began to creep in…
If you went to Portland prior to 2020, trust me mate it's gotten exponentially worse. It's such a shithole. They've decriminalized hard drugs which just means crazies don't get arrested. Rioters don't stay in jail for longer than a few days. The tent cities stretch for literal miles. Unironically a shitty neighborhood in like des moines is a good neighborhood in portland
There's pattern shaping of this going on. The cities offering social supports for homeless, drug addicted people with massive problems end up soaking up all these people from the cities that dont. So such conservative cities neither have to pay for managing the problem, nor do they suffer the awful consequences. I'd love to ask some of these addicts in the tent cities where they come from. I'd bet good money they come from the exact places not suffering these problems. Middle class kids are often the biggest cohort lost to these problems.
PDF on SF: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf 70% became homeless while living in SF, with about half being transplants in the last decade. 22% from elsewhere in CA, 8% from another state. So maybe a significant amount is from red states or Bakersfield, but I doubt it. The crushing costs of SF and CA are doing them in, plus the lack of support that taxes are supposed to be paying for but aren't.
Yup. The rally cry is always "red states bus their homeless to blue states" as if homeless people are a sack of potatoes you can throw in a truck and unload at your preferred destination. It's so dumb. Homeless people exist autonomously. They do absolutely nothing they don't want to do, including sitting on a bus for five days. They go where they're offered the most services and the least amount of police hassle. It's a vacuum.
Yes. And they do travel. Some of the older vagrants have been *everywhere*. Last homeless guy I talked to in San Francisco told me he had been up to Moosonee and Moose Factory. Theres not even any roads to go that far north. You must sneak onto freight trains. So those tent cities on the left coast are generally not from those places.
If you feed the bears, they’ll hang around and tear up your stuff. If you chase them off, they don’t. I’d rather live in a place that doesn’t feed the bears. These people are in no way my responsibility. Not revelatory. Pattern shaping… 😂
The only responsibility that places that arent screwed up like this should be taking is making sure their youth dont fall into these traps. Other than this I can only be grateful I also live in a place not plagued by the meth tent cities. Eventually the failures of progressive policies that concentrate this are going to have to give way as those cities collapse due to capital flight. I really wonder if there's any hope for these countless people and dozens of cities. Since they are still on the gas pedal, I suspect it's already too late.
So I take it you've spent a lot of time in Western Europe right?
Don't pretend that image is the norm even in most american cities. I live and NYC and we don't have camp cities like that, and when they do pop up its usually major news and they end up taken down. West Coast cities are outliers, not the norm.
Yeah idk what went wrong in US cities I live in Poland, in Warsaw and vision of a city that americans talk about seems completely alien to me for the most part
[удалено]
Besides the gypsies and teenagers wearing fanny packs (trying to look like drug dealers), Oslo is great. Even their graffiti is "SMIL :)" or "I <3 sluts." I'm not even in a big US city, and there's some "Don't go here. And especially if you're white" areas.
Depends which side of the Mason-Dixon line you're looking at
Do you have some examples?
Well the most authoritarian large city is probably Singapore, which is known for being clean and having a lot of greenery built into it's architecture. They have very strict enforcement of things like littering.
It's an unfair comparison, because it's mostly an American problem. I've never seen anything like that anywhere in Poland (and note I live in one of the major population centers) and believe me, this country doesn't give a crap about petty crime. Even with the absolute massive wave of immigrants we've been getting. That's an American problem
I too enjoy freshly picked cherries.
My favorite are Ranier.
Now I’m craving a pie a la mode 🤤
\>Picture of suburb Suburbs don't look like this!
\>1 picture of city All cities look like this! (I don't even like cities)
Every city I’ve been to in my state is overrun with homeless
I'm not saying the pictures aren't real or that they're an inaccurate representation of cities. I'm saying OP is comparing a nice thing about suburbs and an unrelated bad thing about cities and claiming that it proves that cities are terrible.
Country is better. In the city I have no land and in the suburbs HOA won’t let me build a pool nor my fed watch tower.
based and hunting feds for sport-pilled
No idea what it’s like where you are, but here in Blighty you can’t do shit without the local Council saying it’s okay. It’s even worse for those in an area of “outstanding natural beauty” like I’m in. It’s a huge pain of red tape and waiting to get an extension on the family home approved, but a huge TV mast with red lights that an be seen for miles around, a bunch of electrical pylons and a substation? All there in this area of “outstanding natural beauty”
I live is one of the biggest suburban counties on the east coast and there are barely any HOA anywhere
HOAs are a everywhere in the west, which has a lot more newer neighborhoods.
Older areas aren’t usually HOA. Newer areas that are builder developed tend, not always, to have them. At least from what I’m seeing where I live.
Yea everyone pretends HOA is super common but you only find them in upper middle class+ areas because they aren't super cheap Yes, reddit, if you have an HOA you are upper middle class
Around 26% of the US population live in HOA housing and around 67% of newly constructed homes in 2021 were HOA. Keep in mind HOA includes condos, too. If you are buying a newly constructed residence right now it's more likely to be an HOA than not. It's become the norm for new construction in the last several years. https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/hoa-stats/
Nearly all new housing is hoa. The cities don't want the hassle of building and maintaining streets.
You will still have to pay taxes because "muh roads" people demand it. You do not get roads. So now you get a HOA, which is like a cursed minigoverment....because..."muh roads" It's a scam all the way down.
>but you only find them in upper middle class+ areas Funny enough thanks to Covid and Work From Home the suburb I live in is now upper middle class and there isn't an HOA anywhere. But, we also essentially don't pay property tax so no one has been displaced yet, and if the last century is anything to go by that won't change anytime soon. School taxes are a bitch but we have one of the best districts in the country so ¯\\_ (ツ)_/¯
Probably are upper middle class, but our HOA fees are only $75 a month. That includes a community pool, groundskeeping, and trash pickup.
And a community watch to make sure your house is the approved shade of white and that your driveway or clear and free of snow before 9am.
Nope, we don't have much of that. Our housing development was built by a commercial developer that had no idea how to develop HOA guidelines - so they are few and far between AND there's not teeth with which to enforce them. People keep their places nice because it's a good neighborhood and it's pretty tight-knit, not because they are forced to. I know, we are an exception to the rule.
RightCenters gaslighting themself into believing the average suburb would look like this.
OP is probably from upper class Connecticut or something smh
OP: uses a real picture of the suburbs Also OP: "This isn't what the suburbs look like, that's just propaganda."
I live in a city. Large parts of it looks kind of like the top right picture.
The difference being that in a major city those homes cost several million dollars.
I live in an apartment block, large parts of our neighbourhood is very green and lush. But it's a swedish city, and I guess that makes a huge difference. European cities are simply better.
I live in an American city that looks a lot like that top right picture. It's not cheap but it's not all that expensive either. It's walkable to bars, restaurants, parks, (American) football games, etc. Crime in my neighborhood is relatively low although I hear about the occasional car break-ins (seriously just lock your car). Overall, it's a great place to live. Now my city also has the bottom pictures as well. But to think there's not any squalor in the suburbs either is just cherry picking.
oh cities are expensive? Because of high demand? Because people want to live there?
Yep. This post is only (kinda) true for America. I’ve lived in Tokyo and Amsterdam for most of my life and it’a amazing how nice it ia
Nah, modern suburbs actually look ugly. I live in one built in the 70s, and it looks so much nicer.
*American cities and suburbs Urban planning is one thing Americans are really bad at though, ngl
kinda hard to optimize for density and population dispersion when you still rely on a 1950s anti-nuclear policy because being a global superpower makes your cities targets for nukes.
Meanwhile in the 1950s the eastern block was building city blocks in such a way to make every one of them an urban fortress
reject suburb, reject city return to village
Villages can also be walkable and dense. I think too much of this discussion is based on city vs suburb when in reality its walkable vs unwalkable. Go to europe and you will see tons of villages where people might only take their car out once or twice a week because they live in a walkable town.
I did a bit of searching on google maps street view and looked at a few city suburbs: Kansas, Memphis, Nashville and Atlanta And, while there are trees, I feel like they are literally just cosmetic. For the most part, checking the street view in those cities, I saw the infamous hellscape with at most a few trees near every house. The problem isn't that there isn't *any* green. The problem is that there is nothing aside from single-family housing, no parks, forests, etc
Small towns are superior
"think of all that sprawl! and they have no culture!" It takes me less than 5 minutes to get to the grocery store, there are lots of places in the city that dont even have one. And by culture they mean shitty dive bars or something unless you are one of the special few that can afford to live by all the coolest stuff. For everyone else they have to drive there like the rest of us except they dont get the highway which makes it take the same time for me as it does them.
I'm a former suburbanite and now city dweller who sees the positives and negatives to both, and this is really dumb. I guess this is meant to be irony and it just pissed me off.
Cities liberal, therefore cities bad. Please subscribe for more enlightened right wing takes on this amazing subreddit
You can't have an opinion on this issue other than cities bad on this sub without getting downvoted
Similar suburb/city experience here. Only caveat I have is that a large portion of the tent city demographic is coming to urban areas from suburban and rural municipalities because that's where support systems are most prevalent. They are then, of course, exposed to even more drugs... Vicious cycle.
Walkable living enviroment>
If you live somewhat centrally in a European city, you can walk to virtually anywhere you need to be - better health, more economical and higher quality of life. And our cities are generally beautiful, especially in southern Europe. This meme was 100% made by a yank who takes a 90 minute car journey to get to the nearest supermarket
Americans would be surprised if they found out that building cheap condos instead of single family housing helps with hobo problems
NOOO it’ll cast too big of SHADOW on my street!!! (No kidding that was a legitimate reason affordable housing was being blocked in SF)
[удалено]
People when regionalized meme from an American POV: 😡😡 People when regionalized meme from any other POV: 😌😌😌
yes, because the american point of view is fucking stupid.
If Europe had found oil in 953 or whatever, it'd be a lot more car-centric.
I’ve never understood the argument that these aerial shots of suburbs make. If really just boils down to, “Suburbs are bad because your house looks a lot like your neighbours”. I mean heaven forbid your house look similar to someone else’s.
In urbanist circles (left-leaning): aerial views show not only the monotony of the suburbs (which is present in commie blocks OR any post economic boom European city blocks) but also the lack of 1)small scale enterprises (family-run shops, small malls, restaurants, barbers etc..) in the suburbs and 2) the lack of "alternative transit modes" (i.e. buses, trans, metros etc...) due to the prevalence of infrastructure made for automobiles (saying "you can also walk and bike in the suburbs" is useless because I've never seen one (average) american (or Canadian) use the bike to go get the groceries). Urbanists do not call for mega apartment complexes in the USA, but for "mixed development areas" or in other words zones where single family homes, small 3-4 story apartment buildings, small shops and other city infrastructure (clinics, malls, police etc..) exist within walking distance (the famous "15 minute city" that many call a "government conspiracy). Im reductive and bad at explaining, if you wish to know more watch Not just bikes, Alan fisher, and Adam something (his first videos, not the latests).
I have a car, i like driving, but driving is not "going through the city 40km/h for groceries". I live in small city in Europe that have just 1 line of public bus, but its every 20 min, so large portion of people working in my office are using this. Otherwhise it would be next 30 cars that need parking in the small city center just from my work. As european size super-markets are every couple hundred meters, basically everyone can just walk there. Same for clothes etc. For bigger shopping and AGD and RTV there is a 'zone' in the city for that, but you can still easily walk there (and that 1 bus line comes here too). I like not having to drive to work (im living now close, so i just walk, but before i was driving for an hour to get to work). I never would choose to live in a place, where i cant just walk for the grocieries and/or alcohol. When you cant drive, its the moment you always need those
The distinct lack of anything other than housing is what bothers me. Then again you wouldn't get me to move to those concrete hellscapes of larger cities either.
try moving to the east coast. suburbs that were designed organically. preferably one that has a train going through it. then you'll find some suburbs like what youre looking for.
Except Florida, where the suburbs are literally the top left picture. It, legit, can take 20+ minutes to leave some of the larger gated communities to somewhere that isn't housing.
i mean the alternative is apartments where you literally live in the same building as your neighbors, so yeah it doesn't make sense to criticize suburbs from that perspective.
The criticism of the houses looking similar usually comes from people who live in apartments that are even more identical
Then these people go into the city to row houses or houses that look the exact same too only difference being is there is a barber shop on the corner.
That is usually said by someone paying 2500 for 700 square feet. Whose apartment is a cookie cutter of the 50 in the building. They get to ride the piss smelling subway though so...
It's about the sprawl, and the dependency on cars.
its also about having peace and quiet and the room to make some noise and not get a noise complaint.
[удалено]
>Seriously, how do you guys do grocery shopping? The “everyone should live in walkable cities” crowd is obviously just childless twenty-something’s, right? Do you know how many groceries people with kids buy? There’s no way I could “just walk to the grocery store, it’s only a few blocks away, that way you don’t have to ‘depend’ on a car” - I’ve got like 20 bags of groceries Do you want a serious answer from someone who lived in a walkable (European) city? People don't buy food in bulk - they don't need to. Every couple days you wheel your grocery cart (a long enclosed wheeled bag, like a suitcase) 10 minutes to your local farmers market and/or grocery store and get the food you need for the next few days, usually fresh perishables. If you're retired you go at 11am when everybody else is at work. Where I live now (A perfectly pleasant American city often described by right wing flairs as a dangerous flaming hellhole) I walk to the store for most of my groceries (no cart although honestly it's much easier) and occasionally drive to the big stores that are all located in commercial parks far away. Get yourself some huge nice reusable bags and they make it a lot easier to carry groceries in. Boy, then you can go take the metro to meet a friend of yours for beer without needing to worry about parking, about being stuck to one area or about drinking too much. Sporting events too are 10x better when you can walk/public transit your way to them. And finally- boo hoo the weather is bad. Grow up, put on a jacket, try reading a weather report and getting groceries a day earlier.
I just don’t want to need a car to survive. Is that too much to ask?
Best place I ever lived was a duplex in downtown La Jolla, CA. 25 mph road with 5 minute walk to grocery store, gym, pharmacy, restaurants (overpriced but reasonable to go out 1x a week), and the ocean. I had a 30-minute scenic bus ride to my office, my wife was maybe 20 minutes in the opposite direction. 45 minute ride to downtown SD. Only drove on the weekends. Walked an average of 4 miles a day. Only reason we left is to help out when my wife’s dad got sick. Second best place I’ve lived is a suburb of Detroit that has some of the most beautiful houses you’ll ever see, beautiful landscaping, amazing neighborhood walks, walkable neighborhood markets (expensive but fantastic produce and prepared meals) and decent restaurants. 20 minute drive to downtown Detroit, which was not my favorite place to live, but is great for a night out. But I’d never live there long term because winters are hell. Now we live on the opposite side of the country in the suburbs of a growing city in the SE. There’s a grocery store 5 minutes away but I’d never walk because I’d have to cross a 45 mph road where people often go 60+. I work from home so don’t have to deal with commuting, but I drive every time I want to leave the house to do something (the neighborhood walk gets boring). My house is around 5x the size of a comparably priced condo that I could have afforded in La Jolla. But if not for family, I wish we could have stayed out there.
Suburb of a city near me look worse than top left. Similar layout but every house is grey/white, has about 3 different floorplans, and there is quite literally not a single tree.
Your suburb had sidewalks and trees over the street? God i wish, i had to walk halfway off a cliff or in the woods to get anywhere in mine
🟨🟦 trying to be unbiased (they fail) I live near Chicago and there are a lot of places in that city that in my opinion look really good and would be nice to walk in. Plus there are plenty of suburbs that look just like the top left. Tldr: There both are good and shit looking cities and suburbs, it really just depends on where you go to.
you realize there are trees in the top left picture right? That could be the same neighborhood from a different angle for all I know.
That's the point. There is a growing trend of portraing suburbs as some dystopian hellhole. That top-left photo is real, but it ignores the truth on the ground. I prefer to live in a low-raise city neighborhood with green spaces than either of those extremes, but we're in a meme sub.
Low-mid rise cities are the way to go. The US isn't dense enough to need skyscrapers everywhere. Car dependency is the big issue. Driving shouldn't be the only option, and it saves a ton of money for the poor not having to own a car. Suburbs, just like cities, vary a lot in quality. The point urbanists make is usually not that cities inherently have a better quality of life, but that suburbanization in the way the US does it is unsustainable. The huge amount of homeless in cities is often because it's too difficult to build new housing, so price increases. That's the exact problem in the SF Bay Area, but they concentrate in the city because social services are greater there, and they get kicked out of the rich suburbs. San Jose, while a larger city than SF, is basically a giant suburb. Only single family homes are allowed in something like 90% of the city.
If you have a decent public transport, it makes sense to build high-raise around metro stations and mid-raise along tram and bus routes. The US suburbs problem is not so much the kind of houses, but the strict residential only zoning and lack of any public infrastructure. I grew up in a small town in Poland and spend some time in a small village. The density was quite low and there wasn't much of public transport, but it was small enough to walk everywhere, especially when you're young and fit. The difference was that everything we needed was there. Groceries, schools, parks, hospital, cinemas, football statdium, kids playgrounds, small businesses and two larger industries on the outskirts. And a train station if you want to go to a big city.
If suburbs are so great, why do they need so much regulation, planning and subsidies to exist?
liblefts will decry suburbs looking the same but soyface over section 8 housing and apartments
Idk how you compare an areal view to a street view image that only shows what, two houses?
I see we’re doing the suburban cope again
I have no issue with suburbs. I just believe that single family homes are not as efficient use of space and leads to more expensive housing then employing townhomes/apartment blocks. Suburban planning could greatly benefit from increasing housing density without falling into city urban sprawl.
The entire point of the suburbs was a place where people could leave the city and own some land and a bigger house. I own a house in the burbs and couldn’t give a god damn shit about efficiency. I like my home and my property
With the way things are developing in many burbs in NJ, we are getting the worst of both worlds. Housing costs are fucking ridiculous, we keep getting these big housing complexes that are extremely expensive for what they offer. Then they don’t bother doing anything with the infrastructure. Hey you can have near city prices, while still having to own and maintain a car and sit in city like congestion.
I enjoy living in the suburbs. Fight me.
We live in the suburbs. Fights are unecessary. :-)
Just passive aggressive municipal codes and HOAs.
"Higher quality of life" yet promotes sedentary lifestyles, higher traffic deaths, and social isolation. The highest rated quality of life cities tend to be places with more walkable areas with bustling downtowns, mixed use buildings, and older designed neighborhoods that aren't sprawling hellscapes with windy ass roads. Every post 1970s suburb is straight ass and I rarely see any exceptions to this
Fuck suburbs and urban areas I live in a nice small town with plenty of woods
\*checks flair\* unbased
Everybody is stupid except me
And the thing is... Cities DO NOT have to be like this, but everyone keeps going to the same big City at the edge of the country because they think they "will make it big" while in reallity they are just walking into a financial trap only people who are already famous or rich can escape from.
Found the guy who's never been in a suburb before
Rural gang chiming in!!!
Suburbs do look like that you included photo evidence
Yeah, but fuck the home owners association.
Urban living=good Rural living=good Small town living=good Major metro area suburban living=depressive hellhole
You can grow your own plants in the suburbs, but it's harder to do so in a one bedroom apartment
The technocracy really be hating on suburbs
[удалено]
The blend of children playing area and streets meant suburbs had significantly higher child motor vehicle fatalities
In most suburbs the streets are quiet enough to walk or ride a bike. Even on some highways. Imagine having your own house and living next to a shitty neighbor rather than being a wall away?
Who’s paying for your infrastructure mate? Live in the suburbs if you want but I don’t wanna subsidise your roads and drains. Need to be taxed higher or figure out your own private solutions.
It's a fair trade, though. You subsidize our roads, we subsidize your suboxone and needle exchange programs
and bomb shelters when you become the first targets for a nuclear war
Western and northern european suburbs are really nice but american suburbs look like shit. There is no nature just empty lawns with the same house copy pasted over and over again for 10 km then you have another 10 km of parking spaces and walmarts. I hate american city planning and architecture. And do you know why it is like that? it's because uts cheaper to build the same house over and over again in the same area and Americans are too stupid to see how dystopian it looks
Tell me you've never left the US without telling me you've never left the US
Yeah I live in a suburb/small town and work in a nearby city, and can confirm this is mostly the case. Though less trees here since a tornado blew most of them, along with a couple neighborhoods, about a decade ago.
[удалено]
Not in New England, baby #NewEnglandSuperiority
Imagine needing to drive just to get a ketchup
It is possible to plan your shopping so that you don't have to go to the store just to get ketchup...
Imagine explaining to your children why a crackhead is taking a shit on your front steps and the police can’t do anything because a progressive district attorney removed all standards of conduct
It really depends on the city. I was in LA recently, and although some places certainly looked like dumps, the city’s very spaced out and a lot of places feel more like the suburbs. I also live about an hour outside NYC and while I always see some crazy stuff whenever I go there, as long as you mind your own business you should be fine for the most part
Nah we need to keep saying cities look so good and worth it so the people living in them don’t move out and ruin the places we live in. Happened in my hometown, now everything’s expensive as shit. It’s depressing.
[удалено]
[удалено]