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It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Suburban homes have space. Suburban homes have large cars. Suburban homes find groceries to be detour. Costco only exists because large cars & large houses allow families to do groceries in bulk. It's negatives (inability to provide fresh food, fresh bread, 1 day expiry or non-standard items) are also unnoticeable, because you can't get those things in a suburb anyway. You need to drop off kids to school because walking and biking are either unsafe or impossible on suburban roads. The idea of letting kids go to their activities themselves is so impossible to consider, that the car then becomes a solution to a problem of its own creation.
It's like saying that Pandas & superior to Orcas because because they do well in Chinese captivity. Well, the entire Chinese captivity system was an unnatural system created to facilitate the conservation of Pandas. If you are going to compare to animals, then maybe evaluate them outside of a system hand-crafted to benefit one of them.
Why would someone want to solve suburban problems in a city. A city should not have suburban problems at all, emphasis on 'should'.
American suburbs appear great, because honestly, American cities are forced to suck. Even the best ones : 'NYC and Boston' have to be the unrivalled centers of the world to rise above the quicksand that is the American system. Other cities, are straight up terrible. Cities should have city advantages. If the streets are unsafe despite sufficient density and transit, then nothing is going to convince parents to let their kids be independent. If residential and commercial areas are zoned far away from each other, then you can't ever grab groceries 'fresh on the way back'.
Yes-ish. Suburbs are perceived to be higher status because it allowed people to have big families, better schools & lower crime. But, what about suburbs enables any of those 3 things ?
Safety : There is safety in numbers and it hard to commit to the most common crime (car crashes) if you aren't interacting with cars as much. NYC has a lower homicide rate than the median American suburb. American cities are only unsafe because American city police does not enforce crime the same way suburban police would.
Schools : Wealthy places have better schools. When cities are able to self-select for wealthy people like suburbs (Somerville, Newton, Brookline), they have great schools. If anything, cities have access to the best talent and should have better schools as a result. Boston Latin, Stuy High and Bronx Science are 3 of the best schools in the country and they're all in big cities despite much lower property taxes.
Big families : This one is tricky. In an era when most people won't be having more than 2 kids, I can't see why a house needs to be bigger than a 4 bedroom apartment. If anything, a safe city allows your kids to be independent and therefore allows the parents to have more kids without a proportional increase in required work. It is also much easier to setup babysitting when your kids can hang out in a large apartment lounge area or a neighbors house in the same building.
And those points are precisely why Americans live in suburbs. All of these benefits of cities are badly realized in most American cities. People would rather live in good suburbs than bad cities.
I can imagine a world where American cities are ruled like Singapore, and in such a world there is dramatically more appeal to moving into a city than exists for me now. I would love to think that I feel cities are safe enough and clean enough that I would actually like to be in them much more frequently. But, even if that were the case, I just don't have any problems living in my cute little suburb that moving to a city would solve. My commute is 20 minutes each way and the traffic isn't bad at all. My neighborhood is friendly, and there are kids who ride there around the cul-de-sac and play basketball in their driveways. I'm right by a bunch of nature trails, so I can run my measly ten miles/week somewhere with birds, squirrels, the sound of running water, and the occasional snake. And sure, I take a three minute drive to get to the entrance. Sure, I need a car, but I don't mind owning a vehicle. I enjoy the freedom of being able to on long roadtrips or little weekend getaways with my wife at the drop of a hat. I like that I can visit neighboring cities including the little town where I went to college to catch a football game.
None of this is to say that dense cities are bad or that I hate them, I definitely don't. But, I just don't know what problem I supposedly have that the obsessive city-posters think they are trying to solve for me. There's no problem. Suburbs are great. I live in one and my life is great. My friends all live in them and their lives are great. Even if American cities were cleaned up and the guy who shits on public transportation got a bullet and a shallow hole instead of free drugs and a hotel room, it wouldn't make me want to leave.
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I grew up in suburbs and walked to elementary schools and biked to middle school and high school. I was driven to school a single digit number of times K through 12.
Same response to any claim about suburban kids lacking independence. I had a bicycle, my mom wasn't driving me around. I was so self actualized as a suburban kid.
The last three suburban homes I've lived in were an easy walk from grocery stores with bakeries. I'm baffled by the alleged lack of fresh bread availability. I go to Costco, but I don't exclusively go to Costco. I went for a walk with my son last night and he said he wanted to go to the grocery store but I didn't have my wallet on me.
Even in Dallas I remember biking/walking to 7-11 to get a slurpee as a kid. In Fort Worth I regularly walk to the grocery store in good weather, or sometimes to the donut shop or whatever. These were standard suburban sprawl, not particularly walkable neighborhoods. ‘Kids can’t go anywhere without being driven’ is at least as much about parental neuroticism as it is about urban design. Yes there’s a feedback loop, but if Americans were less lazy and neurotic they’d walk/bike to places, and making the neighborhood more suited to walking won’t make them stop being lazy and neurotic unless you just make it impossible to use a car.
How long are / were the distances to closest stores and such?
As a kid? A mile or two to 7-11. I could and did walk in 20 minutes or so; no one else did because they were lazy or had neurotic parents(it involved crossing a busy street). Heck I remember as a younger child walking- with an adult- across the literal busiest non-highway in Dallas to go to the library(a mile ish, I guess). The fact that I was able to do this with my grandparents when they were in their late sixties and early seventies indicates that it's generally doable, but most people just don't want to.
Nowadays closer, but with more busy street crossings. I do see people walking or biking more often in my current neighborhood, but I live in a much poorer area than I grew up in- class differences might be a major factor both because gas is expensive and because poor people let their kids walk to QT or the donut shop or whatever on their own if they want something(to be clear, I'm an adult, but see lots of tweens/early teens walking off to things in my not-particularly-walkable neighborhood).
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Can you share the general region you grew up in ? Super interested. I am trying to build my own list of good neighborhoods in the US.
Various west coast towns.
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As I said, I live in a townhouse in the suburbs. My kids could walk to elementary school. We walk to ice cream, groceries, and a couple restaurants. I can get on my onewheel and get a loaf of fresh bread in about fifteen minutes.
Even with that, we still go to Costco. Anything that's shelf-stable or frozen gets bought in a single monthly Costco run. The time and money saved is enormous.
Once your kids get into semi-specialized sports or activities, you're going to drive. If one kid is into fencing and the other is into rock climbing, and next year it's hip hop dance and jiujitsu, there are only two solutions. Either you drive them everywhere, or you live at Tokyo density and the bus comes every five minutes.
Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.
It's special genre of comedy for me personally to see Americans on this site with severe lack of knowledge about how things can be different from their own "exceptional way of doing things." In my noname 200k Russian town I could go to all these activities by myself at age 6. Bus or in my case "marshrutka" can arrive every 5 minutes without even remotely Tokio level of density, more accurately seven times smaller than it.
I understand that it's your own favorite way of life and you're trying to defend it but the problem is that it's forced on everyone. And generally we can see worldwide tendency of people wanting to live in big cities where all the job opportunities and interesting things are. Urbanists hate car-centric policies because they are artificially stifling this trend not because they want to force people like you out of suburbs. Europe has suburbs, they are an option there.
Five minute headway is actually pretty rare for a town of 200k, even in Europe. It's usually 30 minutes, 20 if you're lucky, on trunk routes.
It's not my favorite way of life. I love how Tokyo has the infrastructure and culture that allows ten year old kids to have the freedom of the city.
Given the constraints I have, it's a good way of life though. You don't see people like me telling New York to raze their skyscrapers and put in what I want, but you see plenty of Blue Tribers mocking my way of life and trying to ban it.
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Why not both. Nothing stopping family, friend and jobs from being in a city.
I was being unfair. Costco is amazing. But a single monthly run vs Costco being your only weekly / twice-a-week grocery store are very different things. A monthly costco trip is a perfect SUV rental / 1 car household use-case.
Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.
Why one car? This is 'murica! I have a two car garage. Tesla for the daily, Tacoma for Costco/Home Depot/bulky kids sports/camping trips.
start here for places like this. They're going up everywhere though. Five-over-ones in a town center for the singles, townhouses for the childless couples (I think they're perfect for small families), and then an outlying spread of relatively tall houses/small yards for bigger families.
I'd recommend them in a vacuum the same way I would recommend San Diego. In reality, it's where your friends and family are that matters.
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Well, it's amazing for now. I was trying to fact-check your "no fresh bread" claim, which sounded like nonsense to me, and it took me down a whole rabbit hole of vague stories about conflicts between different Costco executives concocting and different Costco branches taking different policies. It looks like several years ago they par-baked every loaf and just finished up the baking at local stores (and they still use parbaked or frozen deliveries with a bunch of baked goods, while they've always fresh baked others), but today it seems like you might end up with fresh hand-rolled loaves at one store or fresh but machine-prepped loaves at another or par-baked loaves again at a third, and who knows what the policy will be next year.
Man, you learn something new everything. Who could've thought that 'fresh bread at Costco' had such a story behind it.
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On the schools: urban districts in my experience have economies of scale going for them, and are able to have more magnet schools and AP coursework available. Some (many, even) urban schools rank poorly academically compared to the suburbs, but their special programs can easily outperform smaller districts.
When someone tells me they are moving to the suburbs for better schools, I believe them: it's probably true for average students, but that isn't true of the schools you enumerated.
Suburban or city center alike: you can cherry pick a great set of local schools so long as you can afford the correct neighborhood. Or go private or other non-standard public.
Also critically review GreatSchool criteria for each school. When you see an "x out of 10" ratiing for school quality it is usually the GreatSchool rating. They dock schools for lack of racial equity, etc. Their criteria is not the one I would use.
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