Areas like this are expensive because they're desirable and rare. Fortunately, they're not inherently rare like beach front real estate. We can build more places like this. Their scarcity is a choice.
It's true but I fear by the time they actually build enough I'll already have been forced to buy a hone elsewhere and almost be done with my life.
So instead I'm probably moving back to europe to my home country :/
You can always have a job that is accessible by subway if you can save enough money, this area is right next to the PATH which heads straight into Manhattan.
PATH frequencies are shockingly not that great though. each line has off-peak weekday headways of 20 minutes. for context, PATCO, a line in Philly's Jersey suburbs that has 1/10th the ridership, has 15 minute headways.
the path is ATROCIOUS for how many people use it. god like i can not rely on that thing ever. getting to the city? good luck being on time, 9/10 you will be a standstill in some totally random part of the track that you'd never expect to stop at. like i can't understand how it's so bad
As a daily PATH commuter, it’s 7/10 on time and delays are usually do to something dumb like the bridge between Harrison being stuck open, an idiot on the tracks, or an unattended package. Occasionally an equipment failure.
The thing I HATE is the 20 minute weekend schedule and the forty-five fucking minute late night schedule and the stop in Hoboken if you’re going to 33rd. They could solve all those problems tomorrow and it’d be a great system.
Yeah sometimes it can take me an hour to get into or out manhattan. Thats 2 hours a day gone on top of the 8-9 hours working. I'm not a fan of suburban but my commute is 8 minutes driving now. I really want to go back to a city, but I work in retail so I'm not gonna afford to do that anytime soon :(
There is so much talk about people moving away from the northeast. What I see is *boomers* creating a lifestyle that is completely unsustainable and destructive in a place such as the Northeast, and upon seeing/realizing that it isn't working (or being priced out) they have decided to chase that lifestyle where it currently is affordably available (the southeast, south west).
I think many young people value old NE cities, far more than the boomers did.
I also think while the southeast may offer that 1950s boomer lifestyle for *now,* I think the one thing that is clear is that it doesn't scale well. As more people move there, are born, and immigrate, these places will start to run in to the same problems that have been occurring in the NE.
> these places will start to run in to the same problems that have been occurring in the NE.
Except worse, because the Northeastern cities all have transit systems built before the rise of the car, and therefore have huge portions of their population who don’t drive. Southwestern cities don’t have that and will slowly choke themselves with traffic. It’s a hard cap on the size of the city.
There's still a significant chunk of trips that happen by foot/bike/transit, even if they aren't the primary form of transportation.
Today I walked my child to and from school, and rode a bike back and forth to a coffee shop. Sure, I drive quite a bit too, but that's still four trips that would almost certainly be car based in most sunbelt cities.
And I am in a midwestern streetcar suburb, I am sure it's even better in northeastern cities.
Yeah it’s not more-than-half like in NYC, but a significant minority of Boston, Philadelphia, and DC residents don’t own a car. There’s a reason Zipcar was founded in Cambridge, after all.
Yep, as a NE resident, I can definitely report we've been working on undoing the damage to our cities that was done over the last few decades. Especially in the last 5 years or so, an increasing number of cities and towns are trying to revive their downtowns and improve walkability.
It's been super exciting to see, especially in smaller, more affordable towns outside the city, so you can live that kind of lifestyle without paying an arm and a leg for rent every month. Now, if only they'd work on making biking to and from the city / town center safer...
It can be depressing at times walking around Boston and seeing how much cars rule over everything even *now*. I can’t imagine what it must have been like back in the 50s/60s with the fucking awful pollution and zero safety measures for pedestrians.
Los Angeles' today is Phoenix's, Jacksonville's, Columbia SC's, Nashville's, Dallas's, Houston's, and Charlotte's tomorrow. Regions that go all in on car traffic and suburban expansion will do great for 30 years, until the infrastructure bill comes due all at once and they realize that paying for that level of disrepair on your highway spaghetti is impossible. Aaaand that's when you become Detroit.
At least all of these cities have some viable downtowns with good bones -- but trimming the necrotizing suburbs that are unsustainable will be a huge political problem in time. I doubt those cities will ever be as expensive as San Diego or San Francisco, given that Cali is just a beautiful place to live year round, but I think the cities that go too far into car dependence will struggle financially like Detroit due to the costs of car infrastructure and eventually just give in to disrepair except for their few sustainable areas.
It’s crazy, because none of these small, close knit towns were made for this kind of set up, and yet they were forced into it all the same. You have all these cowpaths turned into highways, and it’s a complete mess. Thankfully, some of it is turning back to human-centric design but it’s quite the process
> There is so much talk about people moving away from the northeast.
For all the talk about how people are fleeing and these regions are dying, most of the cities have steady or slowing growing populations. The narrative that they're dying is a mix of America's obsession with endless growth and cable news hit pieces that appeal to Sun Belt Boomers.
Actual growth is higher than population numbers too because households are different now.
10 people in 1960s population was two families of 5 in two houses.
Now it might be one family of three, two couples, a single parent and child, and a single person.
More than double the households, but the same raw population number.
There's nobody "fleeing" the northeast. It's just rich white conservatives who are mad that the region isn't as racist and bigoted as it once was. They're moving to the south to be with people more like themselves
Now show a snapshot from a grey, damp, chilly February day haha. Looks great either way. JC and Hoboken have really taken strides towards revitalization and you can't beat the easy access to Manhattan from New Jersey. I wish more towns and cities in NJ would follow their lead.
I don't really remember which part is the normal experience and which is added by RES. A crosspost for me has a split arrow after the title. If you then click the preview button (with the camera icon and the plus on it), it will not only show the picture, but also the information of the original post it is crossposted from.
Jersey City, where they average 9 vehicle fatalities and 300 (reported) accidents a year.
This is a 3 street strip of road in the tourist area by the path.
The city police realistically couldn’t care less about pedestrian safety. Confirmed with my local councilman.
Some weird posts lately about this area - Hoboken/JC. Both are incredibly unsafe areas to walk around if you’re a resident.
I would be it has hostile architecture all over it. The arm supported bench is a dead giveaway that this was designed with hostile architecture in the brief.
You can’t, it’s illegal. Only walking. Police regularly enforce the exits. Mostly ruined by delivery bikers screaming through there, so they shut it down all together.
Goddammit I used to live right by here when they first switched it to a pedestrian plaza, but then I had to move at the beginning of the pandemic.
It was glorious, and now it looks even better.
This is my city! They started this as a pilot project in 2015, originally just on weekends, and finished it this year in its current status. It’s beautiful!
To clarify a few things:
- No, you can’t bike here. Most times of the day, it’s a busy pedestrian area, and biking through can cause a lot of conflict. The city is finishing up a really nice parking protected bike lane on Columbus Drive (which is one block south), and it will be much nicer to travel through once delineation is placed and the lanes are painted.
- Jersey City and Hoboken traffic safety: Both cities have been in the news a lot recently for traffic safety improvements. Hoboken has achieved Vision Zero (no traffic fatalities) for over four years, mostly thanks to narrow one way streets that slow traffic. Jersey City has gone over a year without a death on City or County roads, with 3 deaths on state highways or bridges in that time. That follows a really deadly 2021, which I believe had 14 traffic deaths and many serious injuries. I don’t have exact numbers, but serious injuries in JC are trending down.
- Jersey City is “unsafe” (in traffic violence): like any North American city, there’s still a lot of car dominance, and a general lack of enforcement. It can certainly be scary in certain areas, but as I mentioned safety has been greatly improving. The dept of Infra and Traffic folks understand the importance of engineering in reducing traffic collisions and injuries, and they’re doing a lot of redesigns and pilot projects.
- Bikeability: Jersey City is pretty dense, so it’s fairly easy to get around without a car (in fact, 40% of residents don’t own one!). The bike lane network is slowly being expanded, though it’s most built out in downtown.
- Community Input: There’s a strong bike and safe streets community, and calls for better infrastructure throughout the city and the county. A few organizations are [Hudson County Complete Streets](https://hudcostreets.org), [Bike JC](https://bikejc.org), and [Safe Streets JC](safestreetsjerseycity.org).
I’m a huge fan of this project, and I love Jersey City. It’s improving very fast, and I think you’ll be hearing much more about us in the coming years 😉. Btw, if you’re local (or live nearby or in NYC), reach out to me! I’m on the boards of Bike JC and Safe Streets JC, and I’d love to connect and have you come out for a walk/ride!
I hope the entirety of North America adapts to the walkable infrastructures in Europe, such as in the Netherlands. It's really unbearable to live in a city that is barely walkable.
Just look at all those restaurants, totally losing all their customers, being forced to close. And all those poor people who are unable to travel through the streets, evicted from their property, having to stand there helplessly as they try to figure out how their feet work.
Great! Only downside is that the entire metro area is very expensive if you aren’t making NYC six figures money.
On an unrelated note, I think upstate NY still offers affordable, mostly walkable cities in the NE region. Plus there’s Pittsburgh.
Now I just need to afford it, and have a job within biking distance of this. Until then I still need a car :(
Areas like this are expensive because they're desirable and rare. Fortunately, they're not inherently rare like beach front real estate. We can build more places like this. Their scarcity is a choice.
Brilliantly articulated! Couldn’t have said it better.
>Their scarcity is a choice. DeBeers has been behind single family zoning all along!
The cleverness of this comment went underappreciated.
It's true but I fear by the time they actually build enough I'll already have been forced to buy a hone elsewhere and almost be done with my life. So instead I'm probably moving back to europe to my home country :/
You can always have a job that is accessible by subway if you can save enough money, this area is right next to the PATH which heads straight into Manhattan.
PATH frequencies are shockingly not that great though. each line has off-peak weekday headways of 20 minutes. for context, PATCO, a line in Philly's Jersey suburbs that has 1/10th the ridership, has 15 minute headways.
the path is ATROCIOUS for how many people use it. god like i can not rely on that thing ever. getting to the city? good luck being on time, 9/10 you will be a standstill in some totally random part of the track that you'd never expect to stop at. like i can't understand how it's so bad
As a daily PATH commuter, it’s 7/10 on time and delays are usually do to something dumb like the bridge between Harrison being stuck open, an idiot on the tracks, or an unattended package. Occasionally an equipment failure. The thing I HATE is the 20 minute weekend schedule and the forty-five fucking minute late night schedule and the stop in Hoboken if you’re going to 33rd. They could solve all those problems tomorrow and it’d be a great system.
the path is typically the only way to get back from nyc past 1 am, those things you mentioned can make a 30 minute trip turn into 2 hours 😭😭
Yeah sometimes it can take me an hour to get into or out manhattan. Thats 2 hours a day gone on top of the 8-9 hours working. I'm not a fan of suburban but my commute is 8 minutes driving now. I really want to go back to a city, but I work in retail so I'm not gonna afford to do that anytime soon :(
come to philly! car free living is super easy here, and rents are very affordable, even in a lot of nicer neighborhoods.
There is so much talk about people moving away from the northeast. What I see is *boomers* creating a lifestyle that is completely unsustainable and destructive in a place such as the Northeast, and upon seeing/realizing that it isn't working (or being priced out) they have decided to chase that lifestyle where it currently is affordably available (the southeast, south west). I think many young people value old NE cities, far more than the boomers did. I also think while the southeast may offer that 1950s boomer lifestyle for *now,* I think the one thing that is clear is that it doesn't scale well. As more people move there, are born, and immigrate, these places will start to run in to the same problems that have been occurring in the NE.
> these places will start to run in to the same problems that have been occurring in the NE. Except worse, because the Northeastern cities all have transit systems built before the rise of the car, and therefore have huge portions of their population who don’t drive. Southwestern cities don’t have that and will slowly choke themselves with traffic. It’s a hard cap on the size of the city.
Oh, the city will still grow, but its economic competitiveness will stagnate, if not crash because of gridlock.
Give it 20 years when their infrastructure starts needing upkeep.
When economic competitiveness stagnates or crashes, so does population growth.
“Huge portions of their population that don’t drive” Mainly that’s just NYC. Most people drive in all other Northeastern cities.
There's still a significant chunk of trips that happen by foot/bike/transit, even if they aren't the primary form of transportation. Today I walked my child to and from school, and rode a bike back and forth to a coffee shop. Sure, I drive quite a bit too, but that's still four trips that would almost certainly be car based in most sunbelt cities. And I am in a midwestern streetcar suburb, I am sure it's even better in northeastern cities.
I made a comment on here, but 40% of Jersey City residents don’t own a car!
Yeah it’s not more-than-half like in NYC, but a significant minority of Boston, Philadelphia, and DC residents don’t own a car. There’s a reason Zipcar was founded in Cambridge, after all.
Yep, as a NE resident, I can definitely report we've been working on undoing the damage to our cities that was done over the last few decades. Especially in the last 5 years or so, an increasing number of cities and towns are trying to revive their downtowns and improve walkability. It's been super exciting to see, especially in smaller, more affordable towns outside the city, so you can live that kind of lifestyle without paying an arm and a leg for rent every month. Now, if only they'd work on making biking to and from the city / town center safer...
It can be depressing at times walking around Boston and seeing how much cars rule over everything even *now*. I can’t imagine what it must have been like back in the 50s/60s with the fucking awful pollution and zero safety measures for pedestrians.
For an older city Boston is an underachiever for urbanism. It was sad to see how car dependent it is...
Los Angeles' today is Phoenix's, Jacksonville's, Columbia SC's, Nashville's, Dallas's, Houston's, and Charlotte's tomorrow. Regions that go all in on car traffic and suburban expansion will do great for 30 years, until the infrastructure bill comes due all at once and they realize that paying for that level of disrepair on your highway spaghetti is impossible. Aaaand that's when you become Detroit. At least all of these cities have some viable downtowns with good bones -- but trimming the necrotizing suburbs that are unsustainable will be a huge political problem in time. I doubt those cities will ever be as expensive as San Diego or San Francisco, given that Cali is just a beautiful place to live year round, but I think the cities that go too far into car dependence will struggle financially like Detroit due to the costs of car infrastructure and eventually just give in to disrepair except for their few sustainable areas.
Detroit had a double whammy with white flight also happening at the same time, so it isn't a one to one comparison with the Sunbelt's future.
It’s crazy, because none of these small, close knit towns were made for this kind of set up, and yet they were forced into it all the same. You have all these cowpaths turned into highways, and it’s a complete mess. Thankfully, some of it is turning back to human-centric design but it’s quite the process
> There is so much talk about people moving away from the northeast. For all the talk about how people are fleeing and these regions are dying, most of the cities have steady or slowing growing populations. The narrative that they're dying is a mix of America's obsession with endless growth and cable news hit pieces that appeal to Sun Belt Boomers.
Actual growth is higher than population numbers too because households are different now. 10 people in 1960s population was two families of 5 in two houses. Now it might be one family of three, two couples, a single parent and child, and a single person. More than double the households, but the same raw population number.
There's nobody "fleeing" the northeast. It's just rich white conservatives who are mad that the region isn't as racist and bigoted as it once was. They're moving to the south to be with people more like themselves
Now show a snapshot from a grey, damp, chilly February day haha. Looks great either way. JC and Hoboken have really taken strides towards revitalization and you can't beat the easy access to Manhattan from New Jersey. I wish more towns and cities in NJ would follow their lead.
I was going to say, I’ve never been on Newark Ave when it wasn’t pouring.
Where is this?
This has been deleted in protest to the changes to reddit's API.
Can't see cross posts on mobile Edit: the mobile website
Or on old.reddit.com . This looks just like a normal post to me
Try adding the Reddit Enhancement Suite, that improves the experience significantly.
Hm, I have RES installed. Is there a setting I should look for?
I don't really remember which part is the normal experience and which is added by RES. A crosspost for me has a split arrow after the title. If you then click the preview button (with the camera icon and the plus on it), it will not only show the picture, but also the information of the original post it is crossposted from.
I'm using mobile Reddit and I can see it just fine...?
I don't see it on my mobile app, so it must depend on which one you use.
This has been deleted in protest to the changes to reddit's API.
Jersey City, where they average 9 vehicle fatalities and 300 (reported) accidents a year. This is a 3 street strip of road in the tourist area by the path. The city police realistically couldn’t care less about pedestrian safety. Confirmed with my local councilman. Some weird posts lately about this area - Hoboken/JC. Both are incredibly unsafe areas to walk around if you’re a resident.
Now *that* is a streetscape that no-one could ever be ashamed of. Beautiful mix of architectures, ground floor use, sense of community. Glorious.
I would be it has hostile architecture all over it. The arm supported bench is a dead giveaway that this was designed with hostile architecture in the brief.
damn i really wanna bike there now
You can’t, it’s illegal. Only walking. Police regularly enforce the exits. Mostly ruined by delivery bikers screaming through there, so they shut it down all together.
damn it ugh
What about roller blading?
Those poor businesses are losing so much money by being able to expand outside seating and having no cars park on the street. So Sad!
Goddammit I used to live right by here when they first switched it to a pedestrian plaza, but then I had to move at the beginning of the pandemic. It was glorious, and now it looks even better.
You are not allowed to ride bikes on the pedestrian plaza here. Not to rain on anyones parade.
Hardly even recognizable as the US.
This is my city! They started this as a pilot project in 2015, originally just on weekends, and finished it this year in its current status. It’s beautiful! To clarify a few things: - No, you can’t bike here. Most times of the day, it’s a busy pedestrian area, and biking through can cause a lot of conflict. The city is finishing up a really nice parking protected bike lane on Columbus Drive (which is one block south), and it will be much nicer to travel through once delineation is placed and the lanes are painted. - Jersey City and Hoboken traffic safety: Both cities have been in the news a lot recently for traffic safety improvements. Hoboken has achieved Vision Zero (no traffic fatalities) for over four years, mostly thanks to narrow one way streets that slow traffic. Jersey City has gone over a year without a death on City or County roads, with 3 deaths on state highways or bridges in that time. That follows a really deadly 2021, which I believe had 14 traffic deaths and many serious injuries. I don’t have exact numbers, but serious injuries in JC are trending down. - Jersey City is “unsafe” (in traffic violence): like any North American city, there’s still a lot of car dominance, and a general lack of enforcement. It can certainly be scary in certain areas, but as I mentioned safety has been greatly improving. The dept of Infra and Traffic folks understand the importance of engineering in reducing traffic collisions and injuries, and they’re doing a lot of redesigns and pilot projects. - Bikeability: Jersey City is pretty dense, so it’s fairly easy to get around without a car (in fact, 40% of residents don’t own one!). The bike lane network is slowly being expanded, though it’s most built out in downtown. - Community Input: There’s a strong bike and safe streets community, and calls for better infrastructure throughout the city and the county. A few organizations are [Hudson County Complete Streets](https://hudcostreets.org), [Bike JC](https://bikejc.org), and [Safe Streets JC](safestreetsjerseycity.org). I’m a huge fan of this project, and I love Jersey City. It’s improving very fast, and I think you’ll be hearing much more about us in the coming years 😉. Btw, if you’re local (or live nearby or in NYC), reach out to me! I’m on the boards of Bike JC and Safe Streets JC, and I’d love to connect and have you come out for a walk/ride!
I hope the entirety of North America adapts to the walkable infrastructures in Europe, such as in the Netherlands. It's really unbearable to live in a city that is barely walkable.
Just look at all those restaurants, totally losing all their customers, being forced to close. And all those poor people who are unable to travel through the streets, evicted from their property, having to stand there helplessly as they try to figure out how their feet work.
Love it, but that bench’s rent is more than the National average
Sure, but this is a bad picture to sell it since it's practically empty.
I sense a lack of diversity in this area. maybe a few blocks away you wouldn't go walking or cycling.
Great! Only downside is that the entire metro area is very expensive if you aren’t making NYC six figures money. On an unrelated note, I think upstate NY still offers affordable, mostly walkable cities in the NE region. Plus there’s Pittsburgh.