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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most people just want to live where their family, friends, and jobs are.

Why not both. Nothing stopping family, friend and jobs from being in a city.

single monthly Costco run

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.

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.

Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.

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.

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.

Can you tell me what general region you live in. That sounds delightful.

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.

I was being unfair. Costco is amazing.

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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