Why Americans Feel so Poor

[dang1]

"Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base. The most recent census data “show almost unprecedented declines or slow growth, especially in larger cities,” William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution"

‘The Era of Urban Supremacy Is Over’
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/opinion/post-pandemic-cities-suburbs-future.html

[TheGrimSqueaker]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Michael in ABQ, who lives in the same city as me, has accurately described the construction materials and techniques used for multifamily housing. Even the largest complexes seldom go above three stories, and the larger complexes are clusters of multiple three-story buildings, each consisting of a couple dozen apartments of different sizes. These are almost always walk-ups. There is very little wheelchair-friendly housing, and all of it is on the ground floor. This isn't due to a conspiracy, by the way: the root cause of the problem is geological. He might have addressed this in a different thread, but I haven't seen it discussed recently, so I'll briefly describe the situation.

Why three stories? Why not four? Well, because the land under the city is mostly not bedrock but shale, buildings above three stories are disproportionately expensive to build. The pilings have to be sunk very deep, because shift happens and it's important to not have buildings collapse under their own weight and crush the occupants. Up to three stories, you can use slab technology, so the cost of building real estate scales reasonably well with the square footage given the geological conditions on which the building is being built. Beyond three stories, the costs increase dramatically, to the point where the per-square-foot cost is much higher for a four-story building than it would be for a three-story one. For this reason, you will seldom see commercial buildings taller than two stories or residential or office buildings taller than three stories. Basements are a rarity because slab construction is the best and most stable form of construction when you're building on shale. Yet there are limits to slab construction: you can only build so high before you have to start reinforcing it in a very expensive way. For this reason, it's far cheaper to build two or three three-story buildings than one ten-story building on the same footprint. So, that's what developers do. Incidentally, some of the plumbing problems that are rampant in rental property are related to slab construction that makes it difficult and expensive to rip out old and damaged pipes. (That means that if you use a wheelchair and live in an apartment, it has to be on the ground floor since very few units are available in elevator-equipped buildings, and that means you usually have to deal with other people's sewage.)

This doesn't mean there are *no* multi-story buildings outside the downtown core (which coincidentally has more bedrock). It means that the kind of vertical real estate that gets built must generate enough cash flow to justify the cost of building and maintaining it. Those revenues tend to only be possible only with commercial and office space, which coincidentally require far less upkeep in the HVAC and plumbing department, or hotels, which again are much easier to maintain due to the lack of need for kitchen space.

For all these reasons, very little high-rise housing, with appropriate HVAC and sewer design, exists at all in this neck of the woods. The most expensive buildings do tend to be well maintained, with suitable access controlled garage space and responsive management. But those are only available downtown. People mostly don't work downtown: they work in hospitals, on the military base, on a college or university campus, or in the industrial quarter. Schools and grocery stores aren't available downtown. Close to the megaschools, grocery stores, and other things people need, the only multifamily housing that exists is what provides immediate value to investors. That means it's going to be predominately low-income housing. This is often extremely expensive, because the most extreme low-income individuals and families qualify for vouchers and subsidies that allow them to live higher on the hog than the average working-class household or family. It's not unusual for a welfare recipient to pay only about $100 a month for an apartment that costs everybody else $950 or more. The landlord gets the same amount of money, subsidized by the state.

This means that a lot of the problems that go along with poverty, such as addiction and untreated mental health problems, go along with rental housing.

[Metalcat]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Michael in ABQ, who lives in the same city as me, has accurately described the construction materials and techniques used for multifamily housing. Even the largest complexes seldom go above three stories, and the larger complexes are clusters of multiple three-story buildings, each consisting of a couple dozen apartments of different sizes. These are almost always walk-ups. There is very little wheelchair-friendly housing, and all of it is on the ground floor. This isn't due to a conspiracy, by the way: the root cause of the problem is geological. He might have addressed this in a different thread, but I haven't seen it discussed recently, so I'll briefly describe the situation.

Why three stories? Why not four? Well, because the land under the city is mostly not bedrock but shale, buildings above three stories are disproportionately expensive to build. The pilings have to be sunk very deep, because shift happens and it's important to not have buildings collapse under their own weight and crush the occupants. Up to three stories, you can use slab technology, so the cost of building real estate scales reasonably well with the square footage given the geological conditions on which the building is being built. Beyond three stories, the costs increase dramatically, to the point where the per-square-foot cost is much higher for a four-story building than it would be for a three-story one. For this reason, you will seldom see commercial buildings taller than two stories or residential or office buildings taller than three stories. Basements are a rarity because slab construction is the best and most stable form of construction when you're building on shale. Yet there are limits to slab construction: you can only build so high before you have to start reinforcing it in a very expensive way. For this reason, it's far cheaper to build two or three three-story buildings than one ten-story building on the same footprint. So, that's what developers do. Incidentally, some of the plumbing problems that are rampant in rental property are related to slab construction that makes it difficult and expensive to rip out old and damaged pipes. (That means that if you use a wheelchair and live in an apartment, it has to be on the ground floor since very few units are available in elevator-equipped buildings, and that means you usually have to deal with other people's sewage.)

This doesn't mean there are *no* multi-story buildings outside the downtown core (which coincidentally has more bedrock). It means that the kind of vertical real estate that gets built must generate enough cash flow to justify the cost of building and maintaining it. Those revenues tend to only be possible only with commercial and office space, which coincidentally require far less upkeep in the HVAC and plumbing department, or hotels, which again are much easier to maintain due to the lack of need for kitchen space.

For all these reasons, very little high-rise housing, with appropriate HVAC and sewer design, exists at all in this neck of the woods. The most expensive buildings do tend to be well maintained, with suitable access controlled garage space and responsive management. But those are only available downtown. People mostly don't work downtown: they work in hospitals, on the military base, on a college or university campus, or in the industrial quarter. Schools and grocery stores aren't available downtown. Close to the megaschools, grocery stores, and other things people need, the only multifamily housing that exists is what provides immediate value to investors. That means it's going to be predominately low-income housing. This is often extremely expensive, because the most extreme low-income individuals and families qualify for vouchers and subsidies that allow them to live higher on the hog than the average working-class household or family. It's not unusual for a welfare recipient to pay only about $100 a month for an apartment that costs everybody else $950 or more. The landlord gets the same amount of money, subsidized by the state.

This means that a lot of the problems that go along with poverty, such as addiction and untreated mental health problems, go along with rental housing.

Isn't this a bit chicken and egg though??

Where I live, the vast, overwhelming majority of multi family housing is nothing like you described because there isn't a disdain for multifamily housing, so plenty of rental and condo buildings are filled with clean, law abiding, professionals.

If that population had powerful disdain for multi-family housing, then of course multi-family housing will mostly be filled with populations they don't want to live among, because they wouldn't be able to find buildings filled with fellow professionals.

As for the ground quality and such, I know nothing about that, so perhaps there is a structural reason in that specific city, but that doesn't explain the same phenomenon in other cities, and even then, there are tons of well built low rise buildings around me, many of them extremely luxurious. So it doesn't seem to me like low-rise necessarily equals shitty building.

It sounds more to me like no one is building quality low rises because there isn't enough demand. Which comes back to my point about not understanding why there's so little demand compared to so many Canadian cities where multi family developments are pretty much the main thing being built.

I think perhaps the previous point about the strict green belts is a more concrete explanation that actually makes sense to me. Canadian city sprawl is contained a lot by greenbelts, so there's more incentive to intensify.

[ATtiny85]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Well yeah, no one would want to share walls with you...

It took several weeks to repair the holes she'd pounded into the walls, the carpet she'd trashed, the doors she'd bashed holes into or ripped the jambs out of the wall, and the rest of what she'd done to my home with her violent tantrums and overall refusal to clean up after herself due to her commitment to pig-culture.

[roomtempmayo]

Isn't this a bit chicken and egg though??

I think housing is just symptomatic of American society, and doesn't make much sense in a vacuum.

The major metros of the U.S. aren't best understood through the lens of a developed country like Canada or northern Europe where there's a strong social safety net and an effective state monopoly on violence. 

Think of U.S. cities as a developing country like Brazil where there's massive inequality, very little social support, a weak state, ready access to hard drugs, little or no mental health infrastructure, and a social acceptance of private violence, often with guns.   In all of those ways, U.S. cities are more like Brazil than, say, France or the Netherlands.   (The Gini Coefficcient for the New York City metro [54.6] is actually higher than the country of Brazil [54.3], so slightly more unequal.)

In a society with massive inequality, a weak state, private violence, drugs, widespread untreated mental health issues, and mass gun ownership, if you have money you want to avoid unmeditated interactions with the general public.  You can either do that with a doorman building and private security outside - the Manhattan model - or by fragmenting and privatizing the geography with roads and lawns, ala the American suburbs or the gated communities in the developing world.  Both exist, but the second is more affordable and more attractive to a greater number of people in the U.S., partly due to how we fund our schools locally, which furthers the incentive to keep your distance from poor people.

[erp]

Thanks for sharing this insight Caleb - I certainly share the perspective that the US makes very little sense to me, and I hadn't thought to frame it this way.

[roomtempmayo]

Thanks for sharing this insight Caleb - I certainly share the perspective that the US makes very little sense to me, and I hadn't thought to frame it this way.

Glad it's helpful.  One implication is a simple answer to why Americans feel poor when they actually make a lot of money: Americans pay a very large portion of their income to avoid interacting with others by privatizing green space as lawns and transportation through cars, costs that in other places are more efficiently socialized as parks and trains.  It costs a lot to create and maintain a personal bubble.

[TheGrimSqueaker]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Michael in ABQ, who lives in the same city as me, has accurately described the construction materials and techniques used for multifamily housing. Even the largest complexes seldom go above three stories, and the larger complexes are clusters of multiple three-story buildings, each consisting of a couple dozen apartments of different sizes. These are almost always walk-ups. There is very little wheelchair-friendly housing, and all of it is on the ground floor. This isn't due to a conspiracy, by the way: the root cause of the problem is geological. He might have addressed this in a different thread, but I haven't seen it discussed recently, so I'll briefly describe the situation.

Why three stories? Why not four? Well, because the land under the city is mostly not bedrock but shale, buildings above three stories are disproportionately expensive to build. The pilings have to be sunk very deep, because shift happens and it's important to not have buildings collapse under their own weight and crush the occupants. Up to three stories, you can use slab technology, so the cost of building real estate scales reasonably well with the square footage given the geological conditions on which the building is being built. Beyond three stories, the costs increase dramatically, to the point where the per-square-foot cost is much higher for a four-story building than it would be for a three-story one. For this reason, you will seldom see commercial buildings taller than two stories or residential or office buildings taller than three stories. Basements are a rarity because slab construction is the best and most stable form of construction when you're building on shale. Yet there are limits to slab construction: you can only build so high before you have to start reinforcing it in a very expensive way. For this reason, it's far cheaper to build two or three three-story buildings than one ten-story building on the same footprint. So, that's what developers do. Incidentally, some of the plumbing problems that are rampant in rental property are related to slab construction that makes it difficult and expensive to rip out old and damaged pipes. (That means that if you use a wheelchair and live in an apartment, it has to be on the ground floor since very few units are available in elevator-equipped buildings, and that means you usually have to deal with other people's sewage.)

This doesn't mean there are *no* multi-story buildings outside the downtown core (which coincidentally has more bedrock). It means that the kind of vertical real estate that gets built must generate enough cash flow to justify the cost of building and maintaining it. Those revenues tend to only be possible only with commercial and office space, which coincidentally require far less upkeep in the HVAC and plumbing department, or hotels, which again are much easier to maintain due to the lack of need for kitchen space.

For all these reasons, very little high-rise housing, with appropriate HVAC and sewer design, exists at all in this neck of the woods. The most expensive buildings do tend to be well maintained, with suitable access controlled garage space and responsive management. But those are only available downtown. People mostly don't work downtown: they work in hospitals, on the military base, on a college or university campus, or in the industrial quarter. Schools and grocery stores aren't available downtown. Close to the megaschools, grocery stores, and other things people need, the only multifamily housing that exists is what provides immediate value to investors. That means it's going to be predominately low-income housing. This is often extremely expensive, because the most extreme low-income individuals and families qualify for vouchers and subsidies that allow them to live higher on the hog than the average working-class household or family. It's not unusual for a welfare recipient to pay only about $100 a month for an apartment that costs everybody else $950 or more. The landlord gets the same amount of money, subsidized by the state.

This means that a lot of the problems that go along with poverty, such as addiction and untreated mental health problems, go along with rental housing.

Isn't this a bit chicken and egg though??

Where I live, the vast, overwhelming majority of multi family housing is nothing like you described because there isn't a disdain for multifamily housing, so plenty of rental and condo buildings are filled with clean, law abiding, professionals.

If that population had powerful disdain for multi-family housing, then of course multi-family housing will mostly be filled with populations they don't want to live among, because they wouldn't be able to find buildings filled with fellow professionals.

As for the ground quality and such, I know nothing about that, so perhaps there is a structural reason in that specific city, but that doesn't explain the same phenomenon in other cities, and even then, there are tons of well built low rise buildings around me, many of them extremely luxurious. So it doesn't seem to me like low-rise necessarily equals shitty building.

It sounds more to me like no one is building quality low rises because there isn't enough demand. Which comes back to my point about not understanding why there's so little demand compared to so many Canadian cities where multi family developments are pretty much the main thing being built.

I think perhaps the previous point about the strict green belts is a more concrete explanation that actually makes sense to me. Canadian city sprawl is contained a lot by greenbelts, so there's more incentive to intensify.

The disdain is not causing the geological conditions. The shale predates human evolution. Likewise, disdain is not causing the behavior of the lowest common denominator in groups. Disdain also doesn't create basic mathematics and economy of scale. Disdain doesn't cause profitability calculations to favor some kinds of construction but not others.

The green belt approach, which artificially limits space availability, does create an incentive to build upward because it makes sprawl more artificially expensive. Many US cities are limited in terms of expansion space by physical barriers like mountains and oceans, or by human-caused barriers like large military bases or First Nations reservations. That alone hasn't been enough to compensate for the shale problem.

For grins and giggles, check the geological makeup of the cities you're referencing, and see how many of them are built in geologically stable areas.

[Metalcat]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Michael in ABQ, who lives in the same city as me, has accurately described the construction materials and techniques used for multifamily housing. Even the largest complexes seldom go above three stories, and the larger complexes are clusters of multiple three-story buildings, each consisting of a couple dozen apartments of different sizes. These are almost always walk-ups. There is very little wheelchair-friendly housing, and all of it is on the ground floor. This isn't due to a conspiracy, by the way: the root cause of the problem is geological. He might have addressed this in a different thread, but I haven't seen it discussed recently, so I'll briefly describe the situation.

Why three stories? Why not four? Well, because the land under the city is mostly not bedrock but shale, buildings above three stories are disproportionately expensive to build. The pilings have to be sunk very deep, because shift happens and it's important to not have buildings collapse under their own weight and crush the occupants. Up to three stories, you can use slab technology, so the cost of building real estate scales reasonably well with the square footage given the geological conditions on which the building is being built. Beyond three stories, the costs increase dramatically, to the point where the per-square-foot cost is much higher for a four-story building than it would be for a three-story one. For this reason, you will seldom see commercial buildings taller than two stories or residential or office buildings taller than three stories. Basements are a rarity because slab construction is the best and most stable form of construction when you're building on shale. Yet there are limits to slab construction: you can only build so high before you have to start reinforcing it in a very expensive way. For this reason, it's far cheaper to build two or three three-story buildings than one ten-story building on the same footprint. So, that's what developers do. Incidentally, some of the plumbing problems that are rampant in rental property are related to slab construction that makes it difficult and expensive to rip out old and damaged pipes. (That means that if you use a wheelchair and live in an apartment, it has to be on the ground floor since very few units are available in elevator-equipped buildings, and that means you usually have to deal with other people's sewage.)

This doesn't mean there are *no* multi-story buildings outside the downtown core (which coincidentally has more bedrock). It means that the kind of vertical real estate that gets built must generate enough cash flow to justify the cost of building and maintaining it. Those revenues tend to only be possible only with commercial and office space, which coincidentally require far less upkeep in the HVAC and plumbing department, or hotels, which again are much easier to maintain due to the lack of need for kitchen space.

For all these reasons, very little high-rise housing, with appropriate HVAC and sewer design, exists at all in this neck of the woods. The most expensive buildings do tend to be well maintained, with suitable access controlled garage space and responsive management. But those are only available downtown. People mostly don't work downtown: they work in hospitals, on the military base, on a college or university campus, or in the industrial quarter. Schools and grocery stores aren't available downtown. Close to the megaschools, grocery stores, and other things people need, the only multifamily housing that exists is what provides immediate value to investors. That means it's going to be predominately low-income housing. This is often extremely expensive, because the most extreme low-income individuals and families qualify for vouchers and subsidies that allow them to live higher on the hog than the average working-class household or family. It's not unusual for a welfare recipient to pay only about $100 a month for an apartment that costs everybody else $950 or more. The landlord gets the same amount of money, subsidized by the state.

This means that a lot of the problems that go along with poverty, such as addiction and untreated mental health problems, go along with rental housing.

Isn't this a bit chicken and egg though??

Where I live, the vast, overwhelming majority of multi family housing is nothing like you described because there isn't a disdain for multifamily housing, so plenty of rental and condo buildings are filled with clean, law abiding, professionals.

If that population had powerful disdain for multi-family housing, then of course multi-family housing will mostly be filled with populations they don't want to live among, because they wouldn't be able to find buildings filled with fellow professionals.

As for the ground quality and such, I know nothing about that, so perhaps there is a structural reason in that specific city, but that doesn't explain the same phenomenon in other cities, and even then, there are tons of well built low rise buildings around me, many of them extremely luxurious. So it doesn't seem to me like low-rise necessarily equals shitty building.

It sounds more to me like no one is building quality low rises because there isn't enough demand. Which comes back to my point about not understanding why there's so little demand compared to so many Canadian cities where multi family developments are pretty much the main thing being built.

I think perhaps the previous point about the strict green belts is a more concrete explanation that actually makes sense to me. Canadian city sprawl is contained a lot by greenbelts, so there's more incentive to intensify.

The disdain is not causing the geological conditions. The shale predates human evolution. Likewise, disdain is not causing the behavior of the lowest common denominator in groups. Disdain also doesn't create basic mathematics and economy of scale. Disdain doesn't cause profitability calculations to favor some kinds of construction but not others.

The green belt approach, which artificially limits space availability, does create an incentive to build upward because it makes sprawl more artificially expensive. Many US cities are limited in terms of expansion space by physical barriers like mountains and oceans, or by human-caused barriers like large military bases or First Nations reservations. That alone hasn't been enough to compensate for the shale problem.

For grins and giggles, check the geological makeup of the cities you're referencing, and see how many of them are built in geologically stable areas.

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

[Michael in ABQ]

Another common facet of development in cities is that higher ground is more desirable and therefore more expensive. Lower ground is more prone to flooding and historically being closer to water usually meant more diseases (mosquitos, etc.). So, if you could afford to build on high ground that's where the nicer neighborhoods tended to be. That development pattern has played out across many cities - at least most cities in the US that were virtually all built in the last 200 years. You can also find that the opposite/upwind side of the city from the sewage treatment plant is typically the direction of growth.

[ixtap]

I have rented in apartment buildings for most of the last 30 years and while I have had some bad landlords, it has never been as bad as generalized here. Ironically, the newest apartment I ever lived in was one of the worst, and that was just the landlord not keeping up with maintenance, not drugs and trash and roaches. Only had a problem with roaches in a garage conversion (so sfh neighborhood, rather than dense apartment living) in GA, where they have a lot of roaches, but not a lot of lizards to eat them like FL.

[deborah]

I agree that in most places more expensive places are at the top of the hill. When I visited Valparaiso I saw an extreme example - they had an earthquake, and the bottom of the hill got slammed (maybe with a tsunami from the quake). However, when I visited Tuktoyaktuk, I learnt about pingos. No one builds on the tops of hills there!

[TheGrimSqueaker]

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

High quality construction is expensive no matter where it is located. Builders can make more profit if they build cheap, low quality buildings that barely pass the local codes. That's not a ground integrity problem, so much as a question of what produces the best return on the invested dollar. Not all developers cut corners, but those who do are seldom held legally or financially accountable.

Planned obsolescence may also be a factor, along with the fact that building depreciation can be claimed as a loss for tax purposes.

[Metalcat]

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

High quality construction is expensive no matter where it is located. Builders can make more profit if they build cheap, low quality buildings that barely pass the local codes. That's not a ground integrity problem, so much as a question of what produces the best return on the invested dollar. Not all developers cut corners, but those who do are seldom held legally or financially accountable.

Planned obsolescence may also be a factor, along with the fact that building depreciation can be claimed as a loss for tax purposes.

Okay, but now we're circling back to the points I made earlier. If that's the case, then why is high quality, multi family home development so common in Canadian cities?

There are more than a half dozen highrises either recently built or currently being built around my 3 highrise complex. So obviously in some markets the building of this type of housing makes sense.

It can't be fundamentally impractical to build dense housing. I just refuse to believe that because it's not what I see literally all around me. As I said, I'm willing to believe that some regions have ground structure that make highrises I'll advised, but that can't be the majority of US cities, right?

So that comes back to demand.

This thread literally makes me feel crazy.

[Michael in ABQ]

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

High quality construction is expensive no matter where it is located. Builders can make more profit if they build cheap, low quality buildings that barely pass the local codes. That's not a ground integrity problem, so much as a question of what produces the best return on the invested dollar. Not all developers cut corners, but those who do are seldom held legally or financially accountable.

Planned obsolescence may also be a factor, along with the fact that building depreciation can be claimed as a loss for tax purposes.

Okay, but now we're circling back to the points I made earlier. If that's the case, then why is high quality, multi family home development so common in Canadian cities?

There are more than a half dozen highrises either recently built or currently being built around my 3 highrise complex. So obviously in some markets the building of this type of housing makes sense.

It can't be fundamentally impractical to build dense housing. I just refuse to believe that because it's not what I see literally all around me. As I said, I'm willing to believe that some regions have ground structure that make highrises I'll advised, but that can't be the majority of US cities, right?

So that comes back to demand.

This thread literally makes me feel crazy.

I'm sure it fundamentally comes back to economics (supply and demand, cost of construction, market rent, etc.) and regulatory/zoning environment. Construction costs for those types of properties in Canada may be lower than in the US due to a myriad of reasons - environmental, zoning, construction codes, labor supply, materials, taxes, etc. Demand and market rents may be higher as well.

I found this article about land prices for high-rise residential development in Toronto from 2021: https://renx.ca/developers-bullish-but-gta-multifamily-land-prices-flat

The report reviewed 40 land transactions considered appropriate for multifamily developments of four or more storeys. They sold for $116 per-buildable-square-foot on average, up slightly from $112 in the previous quarter.

The average property included in the report was 4.2 acres and sold for $23.1 million. The average buildable height was 19 storeys and the average gross floor area was 199,020 square feet.

[TheGrimSqueaker]

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

High quality construction is expensive no matter where it is located. Builders can make more profit if they build cheap, low quality buildings that barely pass the local codes. That's not a ground integrity problem, so much as a question of what produces the best return on the invested dollar. Not all developers cut corners, but those who do are seldom held legally or financially accountable.

Planned obsolescence may also be a factor, along with the fact that building depreciation can be claimed as a loss for tax purposes.

Okay, but now we're circling back to the points I made earlier. If that's the case, then why is high quality, multi family home development so common in Canadian cities?

There are more than a half dozen highrises either recently built or currently being built around my 3 highrise complex. So obviously in some markets the building of this type of housing makes sense.

It can't be fundamentally impractical to build dense housing. I just refuse to believe that because it's not what I see literally all around me. As I said, I'm willing to believe that some regions have ground structure that make highrises I'll advised, but that can't be the majority of US cities, right?

So that comes back to demand.

This thread literally makes me feel crazy.

No... it does not come back to demand at all. Having lived 22 years in Calgary, Edmonton, and some cities in Ontario, I'm qualified to talk about the differences between Canadian and US construction. There are radical differences between what's needed to create a residential building. These radical differences translate into dollars. In Albuquerque the problem is shale, however other US cities have problems like earthquakes, hurricanes, and seasonal tornadoes. Admittedly every region has its own construction challenges, yet some of those challenges translate into an economy of scale that favors group living, and others do not.

You've surely noticed how deeply utility, water, and sewage lines need to be buried in areas where the ground freezes. I grew up watching 3-meter deep trenches be dug to supply water to houses, and if a water main broke it was a serious construction problem. The first time I saw residential construction in Phoenix, Arizona, I almost freaked out because I saw some guys laying a water pipe and covering it with only a few inches of dirt. "What happens in the winter?" I asked my mom. "Nothing," she said, "because it doesn't freeze here." I was deeply affected by the fact that there was a place where construction was so cheap and so easy that all you have to do is scratch a line in the soil to provide a major utility.

Back in Calgary, the farther away a building was from the water main, the longer the hole was necessary to run the pipe. Therefore, it was more economical to build houses that were closer to the roadway. Also, the cost of digging the hole was the most expensive part. Once the ground was open, it didn't cost much more to put in a bigger line. Doing the sewage, water supply, and electric cable for a 4-plex or 8-plex didn't cost much more than running the utilities to a single dwelling. This means that, in Calgary, the economy of scale favors multi-family construction when it comes to utilities. In a hotter climate where the trench doesn't have to be dug halfway to Hades through packed clay or even bedrock, there isn't as much of a savings to be had from multi-family dwellings due to utility installation.

Then there's temperature management. Although air conditioners exist in some of the lower-altitude Canadian cities, for the most part the emphasis is on heating a building instead of cooling it. The reverse is true in most of the low-altitude USA. It's a geographical latitude thing. (We have a lot of hot air here, even without turning on the news.) So whereas a designer in Canada tries to minimize heat dissipation by building upward and creating more cube-like buildings to conserve heat, a designer in a hotter climate does the opposite.

The hot-climate architect tries to reflect heat and maximize dissipation while maximizing cooling. Some of the design hacks are over a thousand years old. The farther south you go the more you will see Moorish style enclosed courtyards and compounds with multiple buildings. The goal is to make air move through constricted spaces and then expand, because as it expands it cools. Likewise, tile and stone floors, or even concrete, have a cooling effect so slab concrete scores another win. Throwing more electricity at the cooling problem, while briefly trendy, wasn't possible for most of human history and isn't a viable ecological choice long-term. What does this say for the economy of scale? It actually pushes designers in opposite directions especially if they're on a budget.

For heat conservation vertical buildings are the way to go, since the ratio of living space to exposed walls will be higher. You see a lot of this in the older town homes in New York, Boston, and some of the older, colder US cities. The math is even more favorable in a high-rise, because everyone benefits from the fact that hot air rises. People on higher floors benefit from the fact the people living below them and beside them heat their dwellings, because with less of a temperature differential between two sides of a given surface the heat lost to conduction is less. Speaking of walls, exterior walls tend to be expensive because they must be thicker and, in many cases, insulated with something besides air or cinder block. Accordingly, a building design that minimizes exterior walls will tend to be larger, taller, and approaching a cube. You see that a lot in office towers. The things that go along with a tall building (such as elevators) can be divided among a larger group of people. Moreover, the same things that insulate against heat also tend to muffle sound.

If the goal is to dissipate heat, especially in a humid climate, you flip a lot of the heat conservation problem upside down. A narrower building is preferred particularly if it's possible to open windows on opposite sides of a house to allow air to flow through. Whereas insulation in colder northern climates is chiefly to keep warmth in, farther south the purpose is to keep the heat out. Air, in many cases, or plain cinder block, is sufficient. Building codes often permit exterior walls to be as little as four inches thick. So the cost of an exterior wall, compared to an exterior wall built farther north, is much higher lower (edited to fix).

My final point is that expensive buildings of any size tend to be in places that aren't prone to floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes. Why? Insurance. Most people can't afford to replace their buildings if they're destroyed by a natural disaster. The ubiquitous New York brownstone, for example, is considered very desirable and trendy, and priced to match, but it's not going to be swept away by a tornado the way it would in most of Kansas. In the flood-prone Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the building couldn't be insured. If the whole area is likely to be wiped out within the next five years, actuarial science suggests that it's best not to build there, or if some shelter is vitally necessary, to put in something that costs less to replace than it would cost to fortify and insure.

TL;DR version: the physical conditions throughout most of Canada favor construction that maximizes interior living space and head count relative to utility distance and relative to exterior surface area. The physical conditions throughout most of the USA favor construction that maximizes exterior surface area, and the cost of running utilities to a property doesn't meaningfully affect the price of the finished building enough to incentivize multi-family dwellings. This is true regardless of other factors, such as zoning.

[Metalcat]

I feel like you may have missed some things in my post.

I already acknowledged the explanation of ground quality for *that specific city*, but are you saying that the majority of US cities have ground quality that make building high quality high rises imposssible/impractical?

Also, I then mentioned high quality low rises. Are you saying that the majority of US cities have such poor ground integrity that even building a high quality low rise is also impossible/impractical??

I feel like I already stipulated the point that you corrected me on...so I'm a bit confused.

High quality construction is expensive no matter where it is located. Builders can make more profit if they build cheap, low quality buildings that barely pass the local codes. That's not a ground integrity problem, so much as a question of what produces the best return on the invested dollar. Not all developers cut corners, but those who do are seldom held legally or financially accountable.

Planned obsolescence may also be a factor, along with the fact that building depreciation can be claimed as a loss for tax purposes.

Okay, but now we're circling back to the points I made earlier. If that's the case, then why is high quality, multi family home development so common in Canadian cities?

There are more than a half dozen highrises either recently built or currently being built around my 3 highrise complex. So obviously in some markets the building of this type of housing makes sense.

It can't be fundamentally impractical to build dense housing. I just refuse to believe that because it's not what I see literally all around me. As I said, I'm willing to believe that some regions have ground structure that make highrises I'll advised, but that can't be the majority of US cities, right?

So that comes back to demand.

This thread literally makes me feel crazy.

No... it does not come back to demand at all. Having lived 22 years in Calgary, Edmonton, and some cities in Ontario, I'm qualified to talk about the differences between Canadian and US construction. There are radical differences between what's needed to create a residential building. These radical differences translate into dollars. In Albuquerque the problem is shale, however other US cities have problems like earthquakes, hurricanes, and seasonal tornadoes. Admittedly every region has its own construction challenges, yet some of those challenges translate into an economy of scale that favors group living, and others do not.

You've surely noticed how deeply utility, water, and sewage lines need to be buried in areas where the ground freezes. I grew up watching 3-meter deep trenches be dug to supply water to houses, and if a water main broke it was a serious construction problem. The first time I saw residential construction in Phoenix, Arizona, I almost freaked out because I saw some guys laying a water pipe and covering it with only a few inches of dirt. "What happens in the winter?" I asked my mom. "Nothing," she said, "because it doesn't freeze here." I was deeply affected by the fact that there was a place where construction was so cheap and so easy that all you have to do is scratch a line in the soil to provide a major utility.

Back in Calgary, the farther away a building was from the water main, the longer the hole was necessary to run the pipe. Therefore, it was more economical to build houses that were closer to the roadway. Also, the cost of digging the hole was the most expensive part. Once the ground was open, it didn't cost much more to put in a bigger line. Doing the sewage, water supply, and electric cable for a 4-plex or 8-plex didn't cost much more than running the utilities to a single dwelling. This means that, in Calgary, the economy of scale favors multi-family construction when it comes to utilities. In a hotter climate where the trench doesn't have to be dug halfway to Hades through packed clay or even bedrock, there isn't as much of a savings to be had from multi-family dwellings due to utility installation.

Then there's temperature management. Although air conditioners exist in some of the lower-altitude Canadian cities, for the most part the emphasis is on heating a building instead of cooling it. The reverse is true in most of the low-altitude USA. It's a geographical latitude thing. (We have a lot of hot air here, even without turning on the news.) So whereas a designer in Canada tries to minimize heat dissipation by building upward and creating more cube-like buildings to conserve heat, a designer in a hotter climate does the opposite.

The hot-climate architect tries to reflect heat and maximize dissipation while maximizing cooling. Some of the design hacks are over a thousand years old. The farther south you go the more you will see Moorish style enclosed courtyards and compounds with multiple buildings. The goal is to make air move through constricted spaces and then expand, because as it expands it cools. Likewise, tile and stone floors, or even concrete, have a cooling effect so slab concrete scores another win. Throwing more electricity at the cooling problem, while briefly trendy, wasn't possible for most of human history and isn't a viable ecological choice long-term. What does this say for the economy of scale? It actually pushes designers in opposite directions especially if they're on a budget.

For heat conservation vertical buildings are the way to go, since the ratio of living space to exposed walls will be higher. You see a lot of this in the older town homes in New York, Boston, and some of the older, colder US cities. The math is even more favorable in a high-rise, because everyone benefits from the fact that hot air rises. People on higher floors benefit from the fact the people living below them and beside them heat their dwellings, because with less of a temperature differential between two sides of a given surface the heat lost to conduction is less. Speaking of walls, exterior walls tend to be expensive because they must be thicker and, in many cases, insulated with something besides air or cinder block. Accordingly, a building design that minimizes exterior walls will tend to be larger, taller, and approaching a cube. You see that a lot in office towers. The things that go along with a tall building (such as elevators) can be divided among a larger group of people. Moreover, the same things that insulate against heat also tend to muffle sound.

If the goal is to dissipate heat, especially in a humid climate, you flip a lot of the heat conservation problem upside down. A narrower building is preferred particularly if it's possible to open windows on opposite sides of a house to allow air to flow through. Whereas insulation in colder northern climates is chiefly to keep warmth in, farther south the purpose is to keep the heat out. Air, in many cases, or plain cinder block, is sufficient. Building codes often permit exterior walls to be as little as four inches thick. So the cost of an exterior wall, compared to an exterior wall built farther north, is much higher.

My final point is that expensive buildings of any size tend to be in places that aren't prone to floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes. Why? Insurance. Most people can't afford to replace their buildings if they're destroyed by a natural disaster. The ubiquitous New York brownstone, for example, is considered very desirable and trendy, and priced to match, but it's not going to be swept away by a tornado the way it would in most of Kansas. In the flood-prone Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the building couldn't be insured. If the whole area is likely to be wiped out within the next five years, actuarial science suggests that it's best not to build there, or if some shelter is vitally necessary, to put in something that costs less to replace than it would cost to fortify and insure.

TL;DR version: the physical conditions throughout most of Canada favor construction that maximizes interior living space and head count relative to utility distance and relative to exterior surface area. The physical conditions throughout most of the USA favor construction that maximizes exterior surface area, and the cost of running utilities to a property doesn't meaningfully affect the price of the finished building enough to incentivize multi-family dwellings. This is true regardless of other factors, such as zoning.

Thank you.
These are real answers that don't make me feel like insane. I appreciate it.

[Just Joe]

We've been in our starter home since 2001, and our next home will be a smaller retirement home. Apart from doing the necessary infrastructure upgrades, we've done no remodeling. I plan on getting a realtor in before we're ready to sell and getting advice on how the house should look when we sell it. I'll do whatever helps raise the sale price, and that's it.

The biggest thing is for it to be clean.  Unless you are going to “Flip it” it’s better to sell without renovations so long as nothing is broken.

I bought my current condo with lovely honey oak cabinets (the 80s ones everyone hates). They are currently being painted (as in I sanded the last batch today and will paint the, tomorrow) because I don’t have time to project manage a major renovation.  But most of the time I hate the renovations that are done for the sale of the house, I’d rather make my own.

Hear! Hear! I agree. We'll have to sand each room and its trim before we repaint b/c the previous owners of our house did such a poor job rush (?) painting the entire interior the same beige. They didn't even paint behind toilet bases or the fridge. It is one big beige house. 

A previous house was the same when we bought it 20 years ago but at least the paint was well done. When we cleaned it up for sale we painted using different very pale colors, close to white. It looked very tidy, bright and clean.   

[Just Joe]

Are you saying stroads is why we feel so poor?

I'd never heard this term before, so googled it.  Lo and behold, Wikipedia's example image is Transit Rd in Amherst, NY.  UGH, avoid that like the plague!

If you want more info give the YT channel called "NotJustBikes" a watch. Great channel.

[TheGrimSqueaker]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Well yeah, no one would want to share walls with you...

It took several weeks to repair the holes she'd pounded into the walls, the carpet she'd trashed, the doors she'd bashed holes into or ripped the jambs out of the wall, and the rest of what she'd done to my home with her violent tantrums and overall refusal to clean up after herself due to her commitment to pig-culture.

At the time, I remember being grateful that my daughter's antics, and those of her lowlife entourage and family of origin, didn't create even more of a disturbance for the people around me. It took years for me to recover financially, physically, and emotionally. I still have a way to go.

The other important take-away from that experience, for me, is that there really is an entire class of people who live that way, enjoy it, and militantly oppose any attempt to raise their standards. It's not fiction and it's not an anomaly. People actually live that way and don't die from it. I elect not to engage with them but I do help children and young adults who want to make more productive choices.

There's also an update. When my daughter moved into a living situation where property damage would cost HER money and labor (instead of me), she magically gained the ability to close doors and drawers like a normal human, to clean up after herself, and to not bash in any walls, smash any mirrors, or allow feces to accumulate. After a couple years of intermittent efforts to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, she concluded that hanging out with pig-culture people isn't the way to go. We're in occasional contact, she's making more positive choices than not, and it's basically positive overall.

Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

[ixtap]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Well yeah, no one would want to share walls with you...

It took several weeks to repair the holes she'd pounded into the walls, the carpet she'd trashed, the doors she'd bashed holes into or ripped the jambs out of the wall, and the rest of what she'd done to my home with her violent tantrums and overall refusal to clean up after herself due to her commitment to pig-culture.

At the time, I remember being grateful that my daughter's antics, and those of her lowlife entourage and family of origin, didn't create even more of a disturbance for the people around me. It took years for me to recover financially, physically, and emotionally. I still have a way to go.

The other important take-away from that experience, for me, is that there really is an entire class of people who live that way, enjoy it, and militantly oppose any attempt to raise their standards. It's not fiction and it's not an anomaly. People actually live that way and don't die from it. I elect not to engage with them but I do help children and young adults who want to make more productive choices.

There's also an update. When my daughter moved into a living situation where property damage would cost HER money and labor (instead of me), she magically gained the ability to close doors and drawers like a normal human, to clean up after herself, and to not bash in any walls, smash any mirrors, or allow feces to accumulate. After a couple years of intermittent efforts to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, she concluded that hanging out with pig-culture people isn't the way to go. We're in occasional contact, she's making more positive choices than not, and it's basically positive overall.

Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

Love this update!

People who don't know much else tend to see attempts to change them as interfering. Sometimes seeing an alternative will sink in eventually and I am glad to hear that seems to be the case here.

[stoaX]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator (if you live above the second floor, or have a mobility impairment).

When you own your home, you stand a chance of setting the sanitation standards on your own property. When you rent, the sanitation standard is set by the lowest common denominator. That tends to be extremely low.

Well yeah, no one would want to share walls with you...

It took several weeks to repair the holes she'd pounded into the walls, the carpet she'd trashed, the doors she'd bashed holes into or ripped the jambs out of the wall, and the rest of what she'd done to my home with her violent tantrums and overall refusal to clean up after herself due to her commitment to pig-culture.

At the time, I remember being grateful that my daughter's antics, and those of her lowlife entourage and family of origin, didn't create even more of a disturbance for the people around me. It took years for me to recover financially, physically, and emotionally. I still have a way to go.

The other important take-away from that experience, for me, is that there really is an entire class of people who live that way, enjoy it, and militantly oppose any attempt to raise their standards. It's not fiction and it's not an anomaly. People actually live that way and don't die from it. I elect not to engage with them but I do help children and young adults who want to make more productive choices.

There's also an update. When my daughter moved into a living situation where property damage would cost HER money and labor (instead of me), she magically gained the ability to close doors and drawers like a normal human, to clean up after herself, and to not bash in any walls, smash any mirrors, or allow feces to accumulate. After a couple years of intermittent efforts to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, she concluded that hanging out with pig-culture people isn't the way to go. We're in occasional contact, she's making more positive choices than not, and it's basically positive overall.

Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.

Love this update!

People who don't know much else tend to see attempts to change them as interfering. Sometimes seeing an alternative will sink in eventually and I am glad to hear that seems to be the case here.

Yes, thanks as well for the update. Your descriptions of "pig culture" are fascinating. My few encounters with it left me scratching my head.

[tygertygertyger]

Agreeing that multifamily housing in the US is aimed at young professionals or older families, as was mentioned earlier. There are many upset people in my suburban town because so much development (since the 70s) has been condo buildings going up. A new apartment building is still being worked on, which offers residents co-working space on the first floor included with rent. And naturally, the units are studio, one- and two-bedroom only.

There isn't much for family housing if you want a three bedroom apartment. Or you'll pay a lot for it! My friends had a two bedroom condo in a great part of the city, and moved two blocks away when they had a child. Their new home was a million dollar property, quite old (it needs much much more maintainence than they'd expected), but it's got the better neighborhood school. Since the city public schools have been decimated (rather purposefully, you might almost say), that was really important to them. They tripled their housing budget to make it all work for their family.

They have actually complained that there aren't many young families in their neighborhood there... my assumption is that most families can't afford the premium. Or maybe other families send their kids to private school, which is what most people do who manage to stay in the city with kids, at their level.

My partner and I were very happy living in our apartment in the city for years. The kind of building we lived in (3 units) is illegal to build now, but you can buy an existing building and change it to a single family home, so there's been a one-way ratchet for many years in which people who can afford to buy a building convert it into their SFH. It's pretty wild to me.

In general, I agree with everyone else's thoughts on Americans generally disdaining apartment living. My family thought we were crazy to live in our apartment! They have definite fear of urban living.

And I've lived in several rentals, and nearly all were cheaply built, loud, with other issues: water coming in under the balcony door, rotten boards on the balcony, a furnace whose pilot light went out daily for WEEKS and I'd re-light it all the time. Eventually it failed, and my landlord told me to use my gas stove for heat for a week until their repairman could show up.

My city apartment was the nicest of all of them - we lived there for six years very happily. Except, that when the bachelor guy living above us (who stayed at his girlfriend's place every weekend) moved out, a family moved in. Parents, a young toddler, and a newborn. And they were very nice, but my god, the pandemic had just begun so we were all at home, all the time. And their young kids screamed at nap time, and pounded the floor, and hollered for their mom, and threw their toys, all just above my home office where I was on meetings and needing to concentrate. The toddler got locked out of the apartment sometimes when their mom needed a break, and enjoyed herself by switching our shoes between the floors. I didn't blame them - it was a tough time for everyone - but it sucked.

Now we live in a walkable suburb and love our small house (hard to find a small one). But, there's a lot of NIMBYism that our neighbors subscribe to, but we don't. The city was friendlier, but no one here believes that.

[Log]

Thanks for sharing this insight Caleb - I certainly share the perspective that the US makes very little sense to me, and I hadn't thought to frame it this way.

Glad it's helpful.  One implication is a simple answer to why Americans feel poor when they actually make a lot of money: Americans pay a very large portion of their income to avoid interacting with others by privatizing green space as lawns and transportation through cars, costs that in other places are more efficiently socialized as parks and trains.  It costs a lot to create and maintain a personal bubble.

Really just want to loop back around to how astute this framing is.

And it's a self-perpetuating problem. De-urbanization started with white flight, and now we're multiple generations down of people who grew up in suburbia and whose parents grew up in suburbia, and think of the city as a scary/dangerous place.

People feel the need to put up these protective bubbles because 1) our media eco-system foregrounds crime for easy clicks, and 2) being isolated in the suburbia breeds social anxiety.

---

To take this on a bit of another tangent related to number 2: I've just been reading lately about how much boys are floundering in education and young men are not launching, and it resonated deeply. I look around at the boys I grew up around in suburbia in the '00s and early '10s, from my brothers to peers to neighbor kids, and an outrageous proportion of them are on a sharp downward trajectory of economic standing from our parents' generation.

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment. And it's abundantly clear by this point that social media is a primary factor behind the recent mental health crisis among young people.

I grew up in a nice suburb, with good schools. The kind of place that young parents aspire to move, to set up their kids for success. But good schools and separation from poorer people didn't change the fact that spread out car-centric neighborhoods deprived us as young people of independence, and isolated us socially. This isolation drove us towards addictive behaviors around social media and video games, and in many cases later on, drugs. This was a real "American dream" kinda suburb, and it nonetheless failed tons of us, including my brothers.

This is, among so many other reasons, why I'm so down on suburbia. It's promised as "a great place to raise kids," and yet is utterly failing our kids. I don't blame parents at all for this, as I understand larger living spaces in walkable cities are prohibitively expensive, and urban public schools are lacking all across the country... but if we want suburbs to be good places for families again, we desperately need to prioritize making it safe for children to walk and bike again.

These days, people will literally blame children for getting run over. Our culture is so obsessed with the car that people won't sacrifice a moment of speed or convenience for the safety and well-being of children. The idea that kids should be able to bike around their neighborhoods, so drivers just need to be cautious, is no longer accepted. Instead it's held as holy that drivers should be able to get everywhere they want to go as fast as possible, so the street is dangerous for children and their parents were reckless and irresponsible to let them go out biking on the streets, which are for cars.

Ugh, this all just grinds my gears, I've been deleting things to try to prevent myself from going on and on, but I keep deleting one thing and then adding two more. Here I'll end my ranting.

[Weisass]

Thanks for sharing this insight Caleb - I certainly share the perspective that the US makes very little sense to me, and I hadn't thought to frame it this way.

Glad it's helpful.  One implication is a simple answer to why Americans feel poor when they actually make a lot of money: Americans pay a very large portion of their income to avoid interacting with others by privatizing green space as lawns and transportation through cars, costs that in other places are more efficiently socialized as parks and trains.  It costs a lot to create and maintain a personal bubble.

Really just want to loop back around to how astute this framing is.

And it's a self-perpetuating problem. De-urbanization started with white flight, and now we're multiple generations down of people who grew up in suburbia and whose parents grew up in suburbia, and think of the city as a scary/dangerous place.

People feel the need to put up these protective bubbles because 1) our media eco-system foregrounds crime for easy clicks, and 2) being isolated in the suburbia breeds social anxiety.

---

To take this on a bit of another tangent related to number 2: I've just been reading lately about how much boys are floundering in education and young men are not launching, and it resonated deeply. I look around at the boys I grew up around in suburbia in the '00s and early '10s, from my brothers to peers to neighbor kids, and an outrageous proportion of them are on a sharp downward trajectory of economic standing from our parents' generation.

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment. And it's abundantly clear by this point that social media is a primary factor behind the recent mental health crisis among young people.

I grew up in a nice suburb, with good schools. The kind of place that young parents aspire to move, to set up their kids for success. But good schools and separation from poorer people didn't change the fact that spread out car-centric neighborhoods deprived us as young people of independence, and isolated us socially. This isolation drove us towards addictive behaviors around social media and video games, and in many cases later on, drugs. This was a real "American dream" kinda suburb, and it nonetheless failed tons of us, including my brothers.

This is, among so many other reasons, why I'm so down on suburbia. It's promised as "a great place to raise kids," and yet is utterly failing our kids. I don't blame parents at all for this, as I understand larger living spaces in walkable cities are prohibitively expensive, and urban public schools are lacking all across the country... but if we want suburbs to be good places for families again, we desperately need to prioritize making it safe for children to walk and bike again.

These days, people will literally blame children for getting run over. Our culture is so obsessed with the car that people won't sacrifice a moment of speed or convenience for the safety and well-being of children. The idea that kids should be able to bike around their neighborhoods, so drivers just need to be cautious, is no longer accepted. Instead it's held as holy that drivers should be able to get everywhere they want to go as fast as possible, so the street is dangerous for children and their parents were reckless and irresponsible to let them go out biking on the streets, which are for cars.

Ugh, this all just grinds my gears, I've been deleting things to try to prevent myself from going on and on, but I keep deleting one thing and then adding two more. Here I'll end my ranting.

I too resonate with this. My parents moved out of a city, but in my case ended up in a quasi rural space with farm land. There was nothing to do, but I ended up exploring our land a lot because we had so much. Never could go visit a friend on my own (no sidewalks, and cars sped too fast) until I was a high schooler, and I lived so far from my other private school friends that parents driving was the only option (no public transit where I lived, either).

I think in part because of that my husband and I ended up living in a 100 year old first ring suburb with a lot of walkability being a priority for us. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but my kids, who are getting into teen years, are able to meet up easily with friends all across the school district. My eldest spent the last two days roaming “town” and will be going a different direction tomorrow. I would have *killed* for this when I was a kid, and I’m so glad it’s an option. A little farther out and we would have been completely trapped in our cars.

[roomtempmayo]

look around at the boys I grew up around in suburbia in the '00s and early '10s, from my brothers to peers to neighbor kids, and an outrageous proportion of them are on a sharp downward trajectory of economic standing from our parents' generation.

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment.

I hadn't really thought of the connection between the built environment and the push toward screens, but it's apparent once you say it.

I grew up before social media or even kids texting were things, but even in our extremely safe small town there were a handful of parents who were convinced the world outside their walls was dangerous and cloistered their kids inside.  Those kids quickly turned to a life of video games - first Nintendo NES, then Sega and Super Nintendo - and never really thrived.  I wonder what's become of them today.

[Alternatepriorities]

look around at the boys I grew up around in suburbia in the '00s and early '10s, from my brothers to peers to neighbor kids, and an outrageous proportion of them are on a sharp downward trajectory of economic standing from our parents' generation.

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment.

I hadn't really thought of the connection between the built environment and the push toward screens, but it's apparent once you say it.

I grew up before social media or even kids texting were things, but even in our extremely safe small town there were a handful of parents who were convinced the world outside their walls was dangerous and cloistered their kids inside.  Those kids quickly turned to a life of video games - first Nintendo NES, then Sega and Super Nintendo - and never really thrived.  I wonder what's become of them today.

Fortunately my father did think about that back in the early 80s and chose to live a more frugal lifestyle somewhere his children could safely* explore increasingly farther from the house as we grew in confidence and wisdom. He could have made a lot more living in an urban area, but we had enough and we were free. As a new father myself I fully intend to follow my father's priorities. I'm not interested in living anywhere DS won't be able to explore as he gets older. Where we are now if he wants to bike 1/2 a mile down to the lake and fish (after he can swim) I'd feel completely comfortable with that. The real irony of suburbs is that people move to them in part for safety and then avoid interacting with anyone outside their home anyway. It's taken quite a while to get to know people here but there are a few families with kids that get outside and play. It always makes me happy to see them running or biking down the street.

*As MMM pointed out a while ago safety is mostly an expensive illusion. There are reasonably precautions to be taken, but living is by definition fatal. Undue emphasis on safety is almost certainly part of the reason Americans feel so poor.

[mm1970]

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment. And it's abundantly clear by this point that social media is a primary factor behind the recent mental health crisis among young people.

I grew up in a nice suburb, with good schools. The kind of place that young parents aspire to move, to set up their kids for success. But good schools and separation from poorer people didn't change the fact that spread out car-centric neighborhoods deprived us as young people of independence, and isolated us socially. This isolation drove us towards addictive behaviors around social media and video games, and in many cases later on, drugs. This was a real "American dream" kinda suburb, and it nonetheless failed tons of us, including my brothers.

This is, among so many other reasons, why I'm so down on suburbia. It's promised as "a great place to raise kids," and yet is utterly failing our kids. I don't blame parents at all for this, as I understand larger living spaces in walkable cities are prohibitively expensive, and urban public schools are lacking all across the country... but if we want suburbs to be good places for families again, we desperately need to prioritize making it safe for children to walk and bike again.

These days, people will literally blame children for getting run over. Our culture is so obsessed with the car that people won't sacrifice a moment of speed or convenience for the safety and well-being of children. The idea that kids should be able to bike around their neighborhoods, so drivers just need to be cautious, is no longer accepted. Instead it's held as holy that drivers should be able to get everywhere they want to go as fast as possible, so the street is dangerous for children and their parents were reckless and irresponsible to let them go out biking on the streets, which are for cars.

Ugh, this all just grinds my gears, I've been deleting things to try to prevent myself from going on and on, but I keep deleting one thing and then adding two more. Here I'll end my ranting.

Rant on!  When you combine suburbia, the pandemic, and my teenage son's personality...boy, it worries me somewhat.

He's not very outgoing.  He's not in any extracurricular activities.  He was in school at home for a year.  At least for junior high, he could walk home from school.
He doesn't go to school games or dances.  He plays video games. 

(His lack of social activity, however, is very much "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree".  Replace "video games" with "books" and you have his parents.)

Now he's 17.  Doesn't drive.  But there is a glimmer of hope.  A day or two a week, he bikes home from school.  Not his favorite thing, but he does it.  While we were out of town recently, we left him home with the dog.  One of his school friends with a car came over, and 3 of them went out for lunch and a smoothie.  What the what???

The highlighted...I've mentioned before on the boards that there are a number of bike-ability projects ongoing.  Two of them are on the outskirts of my neighborhood.

The NIMBYs are losing their shit because of the "fucking bicycle lobby".

On every thread in the local comment sections, I point out that the new connector / separated trail that is planned means that MY KID and many many others have a safe place to bike home from high school.  Currently, they are in a bike lane where the speed limit on the narrow road is 45-50 mph.

"BUT I NEVER SEE BIKES THERE AND I LIVE THERE".  Well, I only drive the streets 3 days and week and there are ALWAYS bikes.

Rant over

[dang1]

my 80’s Southern California teen years: rode bike, skateboard, neighborhood parks- hanged out with kids on my block that I went to school with.  Most, old enough to run around the neighborhood with us, weren't restricted home by their parents. There were some, mostly girls, actually, lol - well until they were older.

Alot of the parents worked. Younger kids were at daycare, or with a parent who stayed home or older siblings or extended family. My grandparents lived with us.

Our neighborhood, half a mile by 3/4 of a mile rectangle, bordered by wide boulevards, and a concreted river for flood control, with a path on one bank that went all the way to the beach 10 miles away. At one corner of the neighborhood: a mini-mall with its small grocery store, video rental, some restaurants; and at another neighborhood corner: a park. Walked or rode bike to the elementary school, and junior/senior high- had to cross a boulevard for those; there were crossing guards. Even after getting a car, I would often ride my bike to school- save gas money for fun drives.

People drove slow in the neighborhood, with its narrow streets and lots of cul-de-sacs. I don’t remember anyone getting run over, nor crimes nor drugs.
 
In the summer, when it got scorching hot, we stayed inside someone’s home- which rotated: TV, video games- Atari, Intellivision, until it cooled in the late afternoon, then got outside until dinner time when parents got home from work. During school, other than homework and school clubs, other activities - pretty much the same.

Played team soccer for a bit, realized organized sports isn’t my thing. Was in the Boy Scouts- instead of going to junior prom, I was in the boondooks as the senior patrol leader, lol. Made sure I went to senior prom, though; wasn’t gonna miss that.

After getting a car at 16, other than able to venture further, pretty much the same- though, we went body surfing alot more since didn’t need to line up rides for it. As we got older in high school, we gravitated towards certain cliques, but that's natural. Kids in the block still kept in close touch. Avoided some nearby cities with their gangs; linger enough at those places and you inevitably get the: “ where you from, ese?”

Our family enjoyed being outdoors: camping , fishing, roadtrips - alot, with relatives, and friends. Didn’t feel isolated, since there were often lots of people around.

I guess, really depends on the family and the neighborhood environment. I had a good ‘ole time during my suburban teen years. As an adult, lived at a time in a neighborhood of mostly residential buildings- was ok, but I prefer less density.

My now 25 yr old son, raised in the suburb, seems not too keen on dense cities- currently in a forestry masters program and, these days, Strava full of skiing and gravel biking, in places where garmin inreach is a must

[Log]

...The real irony of suburbs is that people move to them in part for safety and then avoid interacting with anyone outside their home anyway...

...As MMM pointed out a while ago safety is mostly an expensive illusion. There are reasonably precautions to be taken, but living is by definition fatal. Undue emphasis on safety is almost certainly part of the reason Americans feel so poor...

Definite yes to both of these. First re safety: yes, it is ironic that people move the suburbs because they're afraid of urban crime, and then remain irrationally afraid of crime out in the 'burbs. Crime is all relative. Yes, cities are "more dangerous" than suburbs, but cities today are orders of magnitude safer than cities a few decades ago. Still, I received the message as a kid that my hometown was safe, and that the city was dangerous, and that messaging made me anxious and overwhelmed in cities.

I needed the exposure therapy of living in New York for grad school to realize how much that messaging I'd received was bullshit. And tons of Americans never have that experience. Suburbia is all they've known. They know that they feel overwhelmed in the city, and they hear news reports about urban crime, and that's all they need to know to entirely write cities off as dangerous and unlivable.

To be honest, I can still get anxious walking around certain cities at night when the streets are barren of other people, but at least I can poke fun at myself for my fear being irrational, and walk home in the dark anyway. Because calling American cities today dangerous is hilarious. Transport any city-dweller from the '70s to today and they'd be overjoyed at how safe they are.

But, there is some reality to concerns of danger across suburbs and cities, in terms of the danger of cars as opposed to crime. Dangerous street designs have become the norm, and over-sized cars are far more dangerous to pedestrians because of the higher mass, geometry of the hood, and drivers not being able to see the little puny people way down there on the ground beneath them. Parents' anxiety is misplaced if they're worried about their kid getting abducted off the street... but they might still be right to be worried about their kid getting run over.

///

Re suburban isolation: big, luxurious suburban homes reduce the need for going out into shared spaces and actually interacting with other people. Why go to the park if you've got a big yard? Why go to the movies or go see a show when you've got a big home theater? Why go to the bar when you can buy booze at the liquor store for so much cheaper? Why go out shopping when you can just order everything online these days? Many suburbanites depart their fortress of solitude only in the protective, anonymous bubble of their SUV, and then wonders why they don't have any friends.

Note that many of these isolating actions are also the "correct" way to do things if your life operating system is frugality. Being cheap can be isolating. And cheap parents can isolate teenagers.

...(His lack of social activity, however, is very much "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree".  Replace "video games" with "books" and you have his parents.)

Now he's 17.  Doesn't drive...

...Currently, they are in a bike lane where the speed limit on the narrow road is 45-50 mph...

I also picked up major homebody tendencies from my parents, and I think the teenaged desire for privacy can especially exaggerate that. Every little hurdle piles up, so if planning logistics with friends is hard, getting across town is hard, and then you feel irrationally embarrassed at having to explain where you're going to your parents... well, might as well just sit at home and text your friends instead of going through all that trouble. The teen brain is a silly thing.

I also didn't get my driver's license until right before I left for college. Nonetheless, my final year of high school was a significant improvement on previous years, as more of my friends could drive, so hopefully the same comes to pass for your son (:

///

Unprotected bike lanes on 40+ mph roads are fucking nonsense. Complete engineering malpractice. Then these dam morons have the audacity to say "I doN'T SeE aNYbOdY bIkiNg!" Of fucking course you don't, that doesn't mean there aren't tons of people who wish they could bike there.

[prudent_one]

"Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base.

Don't forget the increasing street crime and influx of homeless people and addicts that fill the void.

[SpaceCow]

...The real irony of suburbs is that people move to them in part for safety and then avoid interacting with anyone outside their home anyway...

...As MMM pointed out a while ago safety is mostly an expensive illusion. There are reasonably precautions to be taken, but living is by definition fatal. Undue emphasis on safety is almost certainly part of the reason Americans feel so poor...

Definite yes to both of these. First re safety: yes, it is ironic that people move the suburbs because they're afraid of urban crime, and then remain irrationally afraid of crime out in the 'burbs. Crime is all relative. Yes, cities are "more dangerous" than suburbs, but cities today are orders of magnitude safer than cities a few decades ago. Still, I received the message as a kid that my hometown was safe, and that the city was dangerous, and that messaging made me anxious and overwhelmed in cities.

I needed the exposure therapy of living in New York for grad school to realize how much that messaging I'd received was bullshit. And tons of Americans never have that experience. Suburbia is all they've known. They know that they feel overwhelmed in the city, and they hear news reports about urban crime, and that's all they need to know to entirely write cities off as dangerous and unlivable.

To be honest, I can still get anxious walking around certain cities at night when the streets are barren of other people, but at least I can poke fun at myself for my fear being irrational, and walk home in the dark anyway. Because calling American cities today dangerous is hilarious. Transport any city-dweller from the '70s to today and they'd be overjoyed at how safe they are.

But, there is some reality to concerns of danger across suburbs and cities, in terms of the danger of cars as opposed to crime. Dangerous street designs have become the norm, and over-sized cars are far more dangerous to pedestrians because of the higher mass, geometry of the hood, and drivers not being able to see the little puny people way down there on the ground beneath them. Parents' anxiety is misplaced if they're worried about their kid getting abducted off the street... but they might still be right to be worried about their kid getting run over.

///

Re suburban isolation: big, luxurious suburban homes reduce the need for going out into shared spaces and actually interacting with other people. Why go to the park if you've got a big yard? Why go to the movies or go see a show when you've got a big home theater? Why go to the bar when you can buy booze at the liquor store for so much cheaper? Why go out shopping when you can just order everything online these days? Many suburbanites depart their fortress of solitude only in the protective, anonymous bubble of their SUV, and then wonders why they don't have any friends.

Note that many of these isolating actions are also the "correct" way to do things if your life operating system is frugality. Being cheap can be isolating. And cheap parents can isolate teenagers.

...(His lack of social activity, however, is very much "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree".  Replace "video games" with "books" and you have his parents.)

Now he's 17.  Doesn't drive...

...Currently, they are in a bike lane where the speed limit on the narrow road is 45-50 mph...

I also picked up major homebody tendencies from my parents, and I think the teenaged desire for privacy can especially exaggerate that. Every little hurdle piles up, so if planning logistics with friends is hard, getting across town is hard, and then you feel irrationally embarrassed at having to explain where you're going to your parents... well, might as well just sit at home and text your friends instead of going through all that trouble. The teen brain is a silly thing.

I also didn't get my driver's license until right before I left for college. Nonetheless, my final year of high school was a significant improvement on previous years, as more of my friends could drive, so hopefully the same comes to pass for your son (:

///

Unprotected bike lanes on 40+ mph roads are fucking nonsense. Complete engineering malpractice. Then these dam morons have the audacity to say "I doN'T SeE aNYbOdY bIkiNg!" Of fucking course you don't, that doesn't mean there aren't tons of people who wish they could bike there.

This 100%. I too was raised with the same biases. Only realized that it was total BS in the last few years.

I live in an outer ring suburb, but spend a fair amount of time in Detroit due to work, night life, etc. By far the highest risk activity that I do is riding a bike in the suburbs near my house. Horrendous street design and careless, reckless, unfriendly drivers may be the death of me. Driving in my older mid-sized car feels almost as dangerous for the same reason and the fact that everyone drives a lifted Dodge RAM 3500. Thankfully I am able to ride the bus to work.

Compare that with minimal the risk of being subjected to violent crime in the city while minding your own business. It doesn't compare.

[Blackeagle]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator

As an American who has spent my entire life living in various forms of multi-family housing (apartments, duplexes, and townhouses) this description bears almost no resemblance to my experience.  Even the cheapest, crappiest college student apartments I’ve lived in were clean and safe.  Almost every low-rise apartment building I’ve looked at the past three times I’ve moved has had an elevator, though this is a relatively recent change. 

From my POV, the only major downside compared to the suburban single-family home where I grew up was thin walls in the cheaper apartments and one of the duplexes, but even that wasn’t an issue in the nicer, newer places. 

[stoaX]

I'm curious where this particularly American disdain for multifamily housing comes from.

There are two parts. The first is a strong dislike of roaches, mold, trash, noxious weeds, drug dealing, unconscious people in public places, animal waste, and the smell of sewage. The second is a desire to get what you pay for and to have things like a usable toilet or an elevator

As an American who has spent my entire life living in various forms of multi-family housing (apartments, duplexes, and townhouses) this description bears almost no resemblance to my experience.  Even the cheapest, crappiest college student apartments I’ve lived in were clean and safe.  Almost every low-rise apartment building I’ve looked at the past three times I’ve moved has had an elevator, though this is a relatively recent change. 

From my POV, the only major downside compared to the suburban single-family home where I grew up was thin walls in the cheaper apartments and one of the duplexes, but even that wasn’t an issue in the nicer, newer places.

I've lived in 4 apartments as an adult.  I wish my experiences were as good as yours. Fortunately none of them had all the problems described in @TheGrimSqueaker 's post.

[Just Joe]

look around at the boys I grew up around in suburbia in the '00s and early '10s, from my brothers to peers to neighbor kids, and an outrageous proportion of them are on a sharp downward trajectory of economic standing from our parents' generation.

Basically all of us spent unhealthy amounts of time on video games and social media, largely because we couldn't go anywhere independently. It's one thing for some older person to say "kids these days and their damn phones!" But I just grew up in this not too many years ago, and am speaking from experience. We were pushed to the screens by our environment.

I hadn't really thought of the connection between the built environment and the push toward screens, but it's apparent once you say it.

I grew up before social media or even kids texting were things, but even in our extremely safe small town there were a handful of parents who were convinced the world outside their walls was dangerous and cloistered their kids inside.  Those kids quickly turned to a life of video games - first Nintendo NES, then Sega and Super Nintendo - and never really thrived.  I wonder what's become of them today.

Fortunately my father did think about that back in the early 80s and chose to live a more frugal lifestyle somewhere his children could safely* explore increasingly farther from the house as we grew in confidence and wisdom. He could have made a lot more living in an urban area, but we had enough and we were free. As a new father myself I fully intend to follow my father's priorities. I'm not interested in living anywhere DS won't be able to explore as he gets older. Where we are now if he wants to bike 1/2 a mile down to the lake and fish (after he can swim) I'd feel completely comfortable with that. The real irony of suburbs is that people move to them in part for safety and then avoid interacting with anyone outside their home anyway. It's taken quite a while to get to know people here but there are a few families with kids that get outside and play. It always makes me happy to see them running or biking down the street.

*As MMM pointed out a while ago safety is mostly an expensive illusion. There are reasonably precautions to be taken, but living is by definition fatal. Undue emphasis on safety is almost certainly part of the reason Americans feel so poor.

Our kids did all this on bikes. Smallish town. As long as a person avoids the main roads, there is still a route through town that is bike friendly. Still lots of hills so pedal bikes gave way to a gas powered bike (benefits of a low reg red state I guess), and then ebikes. Lots of kids sequestered at home for all the reasons already detailed. Now that they are all drivers, the kids are in circulation more than they used to be. Our kids were definitely the "free range" type. That's how I was raised and we wanted them to have that same freedom and they did without concern.

We currently live on a big patch of ground that I wish we could have owned when the kids were very young. 8 miles each way to town but still possible on a bicycle, especially an ebike.   

[Alternatepriorities]

Our kids did all this on bikes. Smallish town. As long as a person avoids the main roads, there is still a route through town that is bike friendly. Still lots of hills so pedal bikes gave way to a gas powered bike (benefits of a low reg red state I guess), and then ebikes. Lots of kids sequestered at home for all the reasons already detailed. Now that they are all drivers, the kids are in circulation more than they used to be. Our kids were definitely the "free range" type. That's how I was raised and we wanted them to have that same freedom and they did without concern.

We currently live on a big patch of ground that I wish we could have owned when the kids were very young. 8 miles each way to town but still possible on a bicycle, especially an ebike.   

My current internal debate is if we should look to buy a large piece of property 80 acres farther away from town or stick to something much smaller so we can be closer to the friends we have in town. I do spend the vast majority of my time at home, and I'd make good use of having that kind of space to roam and presumably so would DS... On the other hand I'm not quite introverted enough to just hole up on a homestead all the time...

[Metalcat]

Our kids did all this on bikes. Smallish town. As long as a person avoids the main roads, there is still a route through town that is bike friendly. Still lots of hills so pedal bikes gave way to a gas powered bike (benefits of a low reg red state I guess), and then ebikes. Lots of kids sequestered at home for all the reasons already detailed. Now that they are all drivers, the kids are in circulation more than they used to be. Our kids were definitely the "free range" type. That's how I was raised and we wanted them to have that same freedom and they did without concern.

We currently live on a big patch of ground that I wish we could have owned when the kids were very young. 8 miles each way to town but still possible on a bicycle, especially an ebike.   

My current internal debate is if we should look to buy a large piece of property 80 acres farther away from town or stick to something much smaller so we can be closer to the friends we have in town. I do spend the vast majority of my time at home, and I'd make good use of having that kind of space to roam and presumably so would DS... On the other hand I'm not quite introverted enough to just hole up on a homestead all the time...

Do you feel the need to own space that you would enjoy exploring??

Are there not places you could live where you would have easy access to acres to explore??

I own 3 properties, one in a major city, one in a small city, and one rural, and all of them within spitting distance of many acres of stunning land to explore, which I don't need to own and am not responsible for maintaining.

I grew up on an acreage, and sure it was neat to explore, but the experience was in no way superior to the far more vast and more maintained parks that I have access to now.

I don't find the 5-10 minute drive to get to the woods to lessen my use of them. In fact, it's been a joke for years that although my parents still live on the acreage and we live in a.highrise condo on a major intersection, we actually get out I'm nature much more than they do. For them, it's always there so there's no pressure to go explore it. They take walks up the small mountain every few years.

When I had working legs, DH and I took walks/bikes up various small mountains almost every week in the summer.

When they whined endlessly about not wanting to sell their home to access the equity because they would miss the "nature" DH and I joked constantly about how ridiculous they are because they look at nature and we actually go out in nature.

I'm not saying you would be like my parents and after 30 years stop walking your land and just take it for granted. My point is that if you are torn, there may be ways to have both without sacrificing either.

Perhaps think of nature in terms of access, not ownership.

But I don't know if that's possible where you live. I've selected my locations specifically for easy access to nature. So I understand that's not necessarily a feature of many locations, especially in US cities where there aren't often protected greenbelts in cities. Or so this thread has taught me.

[TheGrimSqueaker]

Do you feel the need to own space that you would enjoy exploring??

<snip>

Perhaps think of nature in terms of access, not ownership.

This is one of the most profound things I've read in a long time.

The insight could apply just as readily to books (public library vs. personally owned), transportation, shelter, entertainment, and more.

The USA does appear, to me, to contain a higher proportion of people who truly don't believe they have, or can expect to continue to have, access to a thing unless they own it. There's a fundamental sense of insecurity.

[Alternatepriorities]

But I don't know if that's possible where you live. I've selected my locations specifically for easy access to nature. So I understand that's not necessarily a feature of many locations, especially in US cities where there aren't often protected greenbelts in cities. Or so this thread has taught me.

I have virtually unlimited access to wilderness. All I need is to get in the car and how long I'm willing to drive is the only thing that limits how empty it is. Seriously I could drive 15 miles, start hiking and after a couple hours not see another person for days, assuming I survived I wouldn't see another road for 100 miles... I love spending time out there! And if you ever want to visit I'm always happy to show people around up here. Helps me remember what a great place it is to live. Most of my life, both here in Alaska and in New Mexico, I've lived much as you describe heading to the hills with the first bit of free time. But, I'm not allowed to drastically change anything out there. I can't for example build a sauna on the edge of lake to jump into once I'm good and hot. It's also I little different to be able to tell DS go outside and explore vs taking him somewhere. I can probably with patience find a smaller property closer to town that would have 90% of the benefits of the large property. I enjoy building things and even making my own lumber though, so I would probably enjoy the space...

[Metalcat]

But I don't know if that's possible where you live. I've selected my locations specifically for easy access to nature. So I understand that's not necessarily a feature of many locations, especially in US cities where there aren't often protected greenbelts in cities. Or so this thread has taught me.

I have virtually unlimited access to wilderness. All I need is to get in the car and how long I'm willing to drive is the only thing that limits how empty it is. Seriously I could drive 15 miles, start hiking and after a couple hours not see another person for days, assuming I survived I wouldn't see another road for 100 miles... I love spending time out there! And if you ever want to visit I'm always happy to show people around up here. Helps me remember what a great place it is to live. Most of my life, both here in Alaska and in New Mexico, I've lived much as you describe heading to the hills with the first bit of free time. But, I'm not allowed to drastically change anything out there. I can't for example build a sauna on the edge of lake to jump into once I'm good and hot. It's also I little different to be able to tell DS go outside and explore vs taking him somewhere. I can probably with patience find a smaller property closer to town that would have 90% of the benefits of the large property. I enjoy building things and even making my own lumber though, so I would probably enjoy the space...

Yeah, you don't need 80 acres for that, you just need the right location.

[Metalcat]

Do you feel the need to own space that you would enjoy exploring??

<snip>

Perhaps think of nature in terms of access, not ownership.

This is one of the most profound things I've read in a long time.

The insight could apply just as readily to books (public library vs. personally owned), transportation, shelter, entertainment, and more.

The USA does appear, to me, to contain a higher proportion of people who truly don't believe they have, or can expect to continue to have, access to a thing unless they own it. There's a fundamental sense of insecurity.

The powerful need to own is a particularly American thing.

I think a lot of other cultures feel less compelled to own and sequester the things that they like away from others.

[Michael in ABQ]

Do you feel the need to own space that you would enjoy exploring??

<snip>

Perhaps think of nature in terms of access, not ownership.

This is one of the most profound things I've read in a long time.

The insight could apply just as readily to books (public library vs. personally owned), transportation, shelter, entertainment, and more.

The USA does appear, to me, to contain a higher proportion of people who truly don't believe they have, or can expect to continue to have, access to a thing unless they own it. There's a fundamental sense of insecurity.

There's a difference between access and exclusive access. I'd love to have a few acres of land for my kids to run around in, dig holes, build forts, etc. Our current 3,000 SF backyard that consists of one bush and a bunch of gravel doesn't quite provide the same experience. Sure, they can go into the nearby arroyo or the powerline easement that runs nearby - but that's different than just letting the kids go out the backdoor. My 14-year-old is fine, but I don't trust my 4-year-old to be out there alone. Not to mention that since it's a shared space there's litter and dog crap and occasional packs of coyotes.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood at the very edge of a city with a very large greenbelt around the neighborhood that came right up to our backyard. It was pretty idyllic in retrospect, but I was still jealous of my cousin who had a couple of acres of woods behind his house where we could go and play.

[BDWW]

These last few posts are dancing around my disdain for (modern) suburbs. I've never understood them.
Far enough away from conveniences like grocery stores and restaurants to require driving, and yet just as restrictive (or more so with some HOAs) than living in the city center.

Living in the country you can do things like harvest your own timber, raise animals, ride atvs, shoot guns etc. But you have to drive to get to places.
Living in the city gives you immediate access to things, but you're obviously limited in many ways.

Suburbs are the worst of both worlds, not convenient and not enabling of rural things.

[Blackeagle]

There's a difference between access and exclusive access.

I’d generalize it a bit further and say there are lots of things that someone can do on acreage they own that they couldn’t do on public land: exclude others, cultivate crops, construct buildings, raise livestock (at least not without a permit), etc.  That said, I think Malcat’s right that many people feel the need to own even though they’re not planning on doing anything that they couldn’t do on accessible public land.

[dang1]

crops, constructing, livestock, timber - seems like alot of work.

I drive my corolla to some remote spot in the national forest, look at the scenery and wildlife, and take naps

[Log]

Funny, a podcast I just listened to about atomization and the loneliness epidemic referenced the sort of romanticization of living way out in the wilderness, miles away from neighbors. "A lot of what it comes down to is fantasies of control—that it feels like we're more in control when we can say yes or no to certain kinds of interactions, whereas if we're living in close proximity with other people we have to cede control."

(Started a thread about the podcast episode here if anyone is interested in digging into those topics.)

[dang1]

it did take some pandemic for some people to realize that maybe being in close proximity to others may not be always such a good idea

[Log]

it did take some pandemic for some people to realize that maybe being in close proximity to others may not be always such a good idea

If you actually look at the data, COVID actually bore out some of the reasons why living in close proximity to others is optimal for health and well-being.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/urban-density-not-linked-to-higher-coronavirus-infection-rates-and-is-linked-to-lower-covid-19-death-rates

"When other factors such as race and education were taken into account, the authors found that county density was not significantly associated with county infection rate."

Additionally: "The analysis found that after controlling for factors such as metropolitan size, education, race, and age, doubling the activity density* was associated with an 11.3 percent lower death rate. The authors say that this is possibly due to a faster and more widespread adoption of social distancing practices and better quality of health care in areas of denser population." (Emphasis added)

Note this paper was released pre-vaccine, so better urban outcomes can't be explained away by vaccine uptake. Vaccine uptake is, however, yet another positive factor in favor of urban living.

Another potential explanatory factor for lower mortality in denser cities: controlling for socioeconomic factors, urban people are generally healthier than people who live in lower density places because of the everyday physical activity of being in a walkable place. ^{(See "The Gym of Life")}

*Activity density just refers to a metric that combines population density with density of workers.

[RetireOrDieTrying]

Do you feel the need to own space that you would enjoy exploring??

<snip>

Perhaps think of nature in terms of access, not ownership.

This is one of the most profound things I've read in a long time.

//snip//

Yes, and the impression of ownership in the U.S. is largely illusory. Because of property tax assessment in most (all?) of the U.S., you never actually control that land, because the government assesses rent and steals it from you if you don't pay up. (pejorative characterization on purpose)

I don't own any property. I simply go and live where the open public land is, and the U.S. has a LOT of it, especially in the western states and Alaska. It would do me no good to get a piece of land somewhere as insurance against a financially rainy day if it's still subject to being stolen by the government for arbitrary rent so that people living vicariously through their children can have idiocy like $70M high school sports stadiums at my expense. Hard pass.

[Metalcat]

There's a difference between access and exclusive access.

I’d generalize it a bit further and say there are lots of things that someone can do on acreage they own that they couldn’t do on public land: exclude others, cultivate crops, construct buildings, raise livestock (at least not without a permit), etc.  That said, I think Malcat’s right that many people feel the need to own even though they’re not planning on doing anything that they couldn’t do on accessible public land.

There are always reasons to control the use of something.

I never said that there are no reasons to own land, I simply asked someone if they had considered the option of finding good access instead of owning 80 acres for their kids to go exploring nature.

If they had said that they wanted to start farming or selling firewood, I wouldn't have asked about using public land instead. That wouldn't make sense.