The Money Mustache Community
General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: Log on January 10, 2022, 12:37:50 PM
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I used to consider myself "not a city person." I grew up in a suburban town (pop. ~25,000), went to undergrad in a tiny college town (population under 10,000), and then went to grad school in... New York City. I spent way too much of my time living in New York City complaining about how expensive it was and fantasizing about getting away to nature for a weekend but never actually doing it. I suppose I never prioritized getting away because underneath my complaining and my deeply ingrained suburban biases, I was slowly falling in love with the city, and was actually perfectly content with not leaving Manhattan for weeks or months at a time. Shortly after returning to suburbia after graduating, the Youtube algorithm began feeding me Urbanism content a few months ago and I have since been ~radicalized~.
Here's a good taste of Not Just Bikes, the channel which first brought me down this rabbit-hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98), and here's a more policy wonk-ish video on taxes and the fundamental unsustainability of the typical American sprawl model: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0 (https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0).
While I see a lot of potential overlap between these communities, I also see giant dilemma in our way: well-designed cities are so scarce in North America that they all become obscenely expensive, so become condemned as "VHCOL" cities. There seems to be a prevailing sentiment here that only stupid sheep would live in these places unless they were there for extremely high-paid work that they couldn't get elsewhere, because obviously they could save more money if they lived and worked elsewhere. As if saving money is the end-all-be-all of happiness, and that the benefits of living in a great city couldn't possibly be worth the additional cost. The thinking seems to stop there, rather than suggest that if these places are so desirable to live in, maybe we should try to build more of our places to be like them.
I could rant rather endlessly about these topics so I'd better stop sooner rather than later. Just hope to inspire some thoughts and discussion.
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I live in Seattle. I love the place, particularly the parts that were built before suburban development patterns took over in the mid-20th century. I very much agree with the main thesis behind the Strong Towns movement. Suburban development would never have happened without as much subsidy as it received, and it's going to need to continue receiving subsidies to survive.
Sprawl is environmentally unsustainable as well. More people need to live in cities going forward, and our governments need to get their zoning codes out of the way of constructing the homes and other buildings that will make that possible.
In the meantime I think a lot of people do recognize how living in a traditional human-scale city is actually really nice, so they've driven the prices up in a lot of these places. I don't think I'd say everyone here advocates staying away from higher-cost areas, but living in an expensive city definitely involves trade-offs. Unless you work in one of the higher-paying industries in that town you're probably not going to reach FI as fast as if you lived elsewhere. That's the reality, and it's unfortunate, but it is what it is.
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Spouse and are aren't yet sure where we will land and having moves so much, we don't really have a home base, so in a sense, everything is open and available to us.
But I am drawn to larger cities, and to living in what are usually the more expensive parts of those cities, because there is true walkability and access to nearly everything we need on a monthly basis, if not longer. Our budget will be much larger, but for us, it is well worth it. We lived suburban (right now, do to work being in the 'burbs instead of the city centers), semi-rural, high density suburbs (not sure how else to describe where we lived in Japan), and what I'd call semi-urban. Pretty much everything except super rural, and downtown high-rise type living, so we have a great sense of what works for us and what doesn't. Ideal for us is sort of a smaller urban center that is part of a very large urban area. This was our last place, and a place we lived near San Diego, too. Both felt like older "Main Street" type living, with nearly everything walkable, but still less crowded than actual city center. Unfortunately, these seem to be the *most* expensive situations in most places. We did save some by walking for many errands and only owning 1 car, but not enough to make up the COL differences, from even 10 miles away. Again, for us it is worth it, and I do hope we end up in a similar place for retirement.
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I lived in Oak Park, IL for a year and it was a magical experience for someone who had previously spent their lives in suburbia. I too bitched at the time about the lack of parking and street people constantly begging for change. I wondered about how people could possibly be happy without a quarter-acre lawn to mow and a place to leave multiple large dogs outside all day. I had still internalized the cultural messages I had received growing up about what sorts of things I should desire. But in the end I was a couple of blocks - with sidewalks! - away from a grocery store and the train which led me to work downtown while I watched the cars idling on the perpetually clogged interstate. Riding the blue line felt like such a luxury compared to dealing with traffic.
This was over 20 years ago, and even then the price of real estate in such a paradise was astronomical. I remember thinking it was a neat place, but only for millionaires. Anyone else who tried to buy into such a fancy neighborhood would surely be on the wage slave treadmill forever. There were such neighborhoods in suburbia too, where people would stretch to get into a prestigious area and thus condemn themselves to house-poverty. I too felt the draw of such neighborhoods, but I also sensed them as a trap. I applied this framework to the Chicago area too, and resolved that I could have it all and also not pay too much for it.
I eventually ended up in a loft apartment in a Southern city, where "downtown" was mostly parking lots. Because I was still car dependent, I really felt the inconvenience of street parking. I was also annoyed by the street people and the fact that I was in a food desert. I decamped for the suburbs. The system reinforced itself.
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...high density suburbs (not sure how else to describe where we lived in Japan), and what I'd call semi-urban...
Both felt like older "Main Street" type living, with nearly everything walkable, but still less crowded than actual city center. Unfortunately, these seem to be the *most* expensive situations in most places. We did save some by walking for many errands and only owning 1 car, but not enough to make up the COL differences, from even 10 miles away. Again, for us it is worth it, and I do hope we end up in a similar place for retirement.
I'm really interested in what it will take to get high density suburbs in the US. I think a lot of the best American suburbs have (or once had) a "main street" environment, but it's usually just one nice, walkable part of town that's not accessible to anyone else without driving. Right now, American suburbs basically only have commercial zoning or more dense residential zoning right on the biggest, noisiest, stinkiest through-fares. Just up-zoning on some quieter streets off the highway through town could make such a big difference in making "main street" environments more abundant and affordable.
This was a great Strong Towns article from just a couple months ago on just the issue we are both lamenting: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-imposed-scarcity-of-nice-places (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/11/3/our-self-imposed-scarcity-of-nice-places)
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I'm really interested in what it will take to get high density suburbs in the US. I think a lot of the best American suburbs have (or once had) a "main street" environment, but it's usually just one nice, walkable part of town that's not accessible to anyone else without driving. Right now, American suburbs basically only have commercial zoning or more dense residential zoning right on the biggest, noisiest, stinkiest through-fares. Just up-zoning on some quieter streets off the highway through town could make such a big difference in making "main street" environments more abundant and affordable.
This is a very good observation. Around here (outer DC suburbs), there are nice older walkable areas. They are, obviously, expensive - although still HCOL and not VHCOL. But the new mixed used developments, while an improvement on the traditional suburb, have only small truly walkable pockets which are right next to highways and choke-full of parking garages. The needs of motorists (including being able to see the place from a highway) still come first. Drive to us, then walk around!
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I'm really interested in what it will take to get high density suburbs in the US. I think a lot of the best American suburbs have (or once had) a "main street" environment, but it's usually just one nice, walkable part of town that's not accessible to anyone else without driving. Right now, American suburbs basically only have commercial zoning or more dense residential zoning right on the biggest, noisiest, stinkiest through-fares. Just up-zoning on some quieter streets off the highway through town could make such a big difference in making "main street" environments more abundant and affordable.
This is a very good observation. Around here (outer DC suburbs), there are nice older walkable areas. They are, obviously, expensive - although still HCOL and not VHCOL. But the new mixed used developments, while an improvement on the traditional suburb, have only small truly walkable pockets which are right next to highways and choke-full of parking garages. The needs of motorists (including being able to see the place from a highway) still come first. Drive to us, then walk around!
The customers have to get to the businesses somehow. A low density of nearby housing means there aren't many businesses that can survive on pedestrian traffic alone. You therefore might need a parking lot. The bigger the parking lot, the farther away the houses are, and the less foot traffic you're going to have to the businesses. Similarly, the residents need to get around the area. If you have a dense enough neighborhood a person might be able to accomplish most day-to-day tasks within a 15-minute walk of their home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city). In such areas a car (and parking space to store it) becomes an expensive luxury. Below that level of density and a car becomes more of a prosthetic: an appliance that a person absolutely needs in order gain a baseline level of function. Low density requires cars, and cars thwart efforts to increase density. It's a chicken and egg sort of thing.
Retrofitting the suburbs into true walkability requires more than just the occasional corporate developer plopping a giant modern shopping mall/apartment complex alongside an existing suburban stroad. You've seen this very well. More bottom-up changes will be required. Let people build denser dwellings. Everywhere. People sharing walls with their neighbors is not a nuisance that needs to be regulated into small areas of your city like you'd do with a toxic chemical plant. So much of existing suburbia has essentially no business activity within walking distance. Let people put small businesses near where the people are. Want to put a hair salon or coffee shop or convenience store on any old street corner? Go nuts! Don't require parking lots for these; a good portion of the clientele should be able to walk there, and for those who can't the existing street parking in the neighborhood will often be sufficient. Over time, cool neighborhood businesses will attract more neighborhood residents, which will attract more businesses, and a virtuous circle of density will ensue.
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This article, originally from 1973, covers a lot of the background and root causes, plus I just think it is an interesting read.
"In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes." - André Gorz, "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar." https://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/
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As an urbanite, most of what I don't like about being in an urban environment has to do with people from a suburban environment coming here in their cars. That's not a wish to eliminate them, but to control their rights, privileges and effects.
The second biggest thing is that my home base is awash in beggars and street-drug sellers and users. After reading "SanFransicko" I believe we are the authors of our own problem by making it so easy and comfortable to obtain drugs. We're a mecca for drug users across Canada. This is a disaster for our social and health services, and it really impacts quality of life in the core.
People leave the city for less dense areas because the city stresses them out. I think you can have density that isn't stressful, but you really have to address the stressors with good design, bylaws and enforcement around noise, and supports that actually work for people who need them.
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Reminds me of the Fran Libowitz line when asked if she’d ever leave NY: “Sure, I’d be glad to get out of the city, but where can you go?”
I also LOLed at the response to the temporary Covid defections among some of the wealthy from the upper west side and elsewhere:
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I really think where I am living now is my ideal. It's a small town on the shore with one main street - I can walk to my doctor, library, bank, yoga, post office, town hall, train station to NYC, a few happy hours, coffee shops, pastry/ice cream shops, grocery stores, book shop, masseuse, hair salons, liquor stores, several churches if I were so inclined, a small theater, and there's a nice 6 mile shoreline loop where I can run around basically the whole thing past several small beaches - 12 miles if I'd rather do a short bike ride and meander a bit more. But because I'm in CT, it's not like I'm surrounded by nothing. It's a whole bunch of small shoreline towns with similar main street setups kind of chained together. I have almost everything I need within walking distance, but if I want something else I don't have to drive very far to get it - Costco, for instance, is a 15 minute drive and the ferry to several different islands with great biking is 20 minutes away. Airport is an hour drive, which is about the farthest I need to go in any direction.
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I've lived most of my life in metro Detroit. Detroit was a food desert until recently and public transportation is not good. They don't even put sidewalks into new suburban housing developments.
I lived in Phoenix for a year where I could walk to work, grocery store, doctor's office and library. There was even a hospital a mile away. I could take reliable public transportation to the airport. I loved it.
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I've been a city person since long before I lived in a city. I grew up in a small town in British Columbia, an environment that many people would view as their idea of paradise (back to nature and all), but it's totally not my thing. People used to stop me on the street when I was growing up and tell me to slow down, smile and relax. (I was tempted to say "Get the hell out of my way. I am going somewhere "fast".)
I moved to a large city (Toronto) as soon as I could, and since then I've had the good fortune to live in several other big cities in North America and Europe (NYC, London and Paris), and have also done some medium-term stays (e.g. 30 days or more) in some interesting medium-large cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Strasbourg, Guanajuato and Quito.
I think my favourite location of all was our neighbourhood in Paris. We lived just outside the city centre but still inside the ring road that delineates Paris from its suburbs, in the SW corner of the city (16th arrondissement). It was a residential neighbourhood that still had lots of shops, restaurants, outdoor markets, museums and parks (the Bois de Boulogne was a block away), with excellent metro and bus service. I could walk to work in 20 minutes. PS - It's a great location to stay in if you're ever visiting Paris, too.
I can't drive, so for most of my adult life I was dependent on public transit or walking to get around. (I can't see well enough to drive, or ride a bike in traffic.) I'm married to a driver now, so we've got more options, but I still prefer to have the independence that comes from living near good transit in a walkable neighbourhood. We compromised a bit when we bought our current house - it has great transit and the neighbourhood is walkable with access to the basics (recreation, parks, bank / drugstore / basic grocery store etc) but there is very little in the way of a thriving shop and restaurant scene. So we have to get in a car or Uber to do most of our shopping etc.
I do sometimes think about moving to a medium-sized, walkable city when we retire. But right now, housing prices are too high in most candidate cities in Ontario to make a move worthwhile.
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The customers have to get to the businesses somehow. A low density of nearby housing means there aren't many businesses that can survive on pedestrian traffic alone. You therefore might need a parking lot. The bigger the parking lot, the farther away the houses are, and the less foot traffic you're going to have to the businesses. Similarly, the residents need to get around the area. If you have a dense enough neighborhood a person might be able to accomplish most day-to-day tasks within a 15-minute walk of their home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city). In such areas a car (and parking space to store it) becomes an expensive luxury. Below that level of density and a car becomes more of a prosthetic: an appliance that a person absolutely needs in order gain a baseline level of function. Low density requires cars, and cars thwart efforts to increase density. It's a chicken and egg sort of thing.
Yes, thanks, I'm familiar with the concept :)
I'm not talking about retrofitting the existing suburbs, though. I'm talking about greenfield development on parcels that would have allowed several Cyclocrofts (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/02/27/how-to-create-reality/).
Our Board of Supervisors would face literal pitchforks should they allow zoning of sufficient density. Local developers, having no resources or experience for this kind of construction, would gladly pay for said pitchforks.
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I think for me my current setup is ideal. We live in an older suburb 25 miles outside of Chicago. My part of it is older houses on .15 acre lots (50x125’) so everything is SFH but very dense. I live 3 blocks north of the library which is the northern part of our downtown; from there it’s a handful of blocks to restaurants, shopping, grocery store, night life, farmer’s market in the summer, and the train that will take you to downtown Chicago in about 35 minutes. My house, while expensive at around $750k, would cost at least $1M more if it was in a downtown Chicago neighborhood, and $2M more if I had equivalent rated schools that I do here. We’ve talked about a condo in the city center after our kids go to college/move out, but honestly the pandemic has really turned us off that idea. Having plenty of space to do things at home, plus our own green space, has been invaluable during the pandemic and if we ever do it again I’d hate to be trapped in a high rise or something without our own outdoor space.
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Our Board of Supervisors would face literal pitchforks should they allow zoning of sufficient density. Local developers, having no resources or experience for this kind of construction, would gladly pay for said pitchforks.
I agree with the first but not the second half of your statement. Everything that I've ever read about the property development business is that they seek to maximize profit by minimizing conflict with the permitting agencies. If today it was cheaper and faster to permit high density mixed use neighborhoods I think that the developers would fall right in line.
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I'm talking about greenfield development on parcels that would have allowed several Cyclocrofts (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/02/27/how-to-create-reality/).
The last thing we need in this country is greenfield development. We have more than enough developed land to house ten times our current population. The forests and farmland should stay as such for the sake of the environment.
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I really think where I am living now is my ideal. It's a small town on the shore with one main street - I can walk to my doctor, library, bank, yoga, post office, town hall, train station to NYC, a few happy hours, coffee shops, pastry/ice cream shops, grocery stores, book shop, masseuse, hair salons, liquor stores, several churches if I were so inclined, a small theater, and there's a nice 6 mile shoreline loop where I can run around basically the whole thing past several small beaches - 12 miles if I'd rather do a short bike ride and meander a bit more. But because I'm in CT, it's not like I'm surrounded by nothing. It's a whole bunch of small shoreline towns with similar main street setups kind of chained together. I have almost everything I need within walking distance, but if I want something else I don't have to drive very far to get it - Costco, for instance, is a 15 minute drive and the ferry to several different islands with great biking is 20 minutes away. Airport is an hour drive, which is about the farthest I need to go in any direction.
I think for me my current setup is ideal. We live in an older suburb 25 miles outside of Chicago. My part of it is older houses on .15 acre lots (50x125’) so everything is SFH but very dense. I live 3 blocks north of the library which is the northern part of our downtown; from there it’s a handful of blocks to restaurants, shopping, grocery store, night life, farmer’s market in the summer, and the train that will take you to downtown Chicago in about 35 minutes. My house, while expensive at around $750k, would cost at least $1M more if it was in a downtown Chicago neighborhood, and $2M more if I had equivalent rated schools that I do here. We’ve talked about a condo in the city center after our kids go to college/move out, but honestly the pandemic has really turned us off that idea. Having plenty of space to do things at home, plus our own green space, has been invaluable during the pandemic and if we ever do it again I’d hate to be trapped in a high rise or something without our own outdoor space.
These both sound similar to where I live, with one important difference. The small town I'm in is more isolated then either of these places and we do no have a rail link to anywhere. I love where I live, but public transport to a larger city would make it just about perfect. On the plus side, I bought my ideal house here for less than $250k.
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...well-designed cities are so scarce in North America that they all become obscenely expensive, so become condemned as "VHCOL" cities. There seems to be a prevailing sentiment here that only stupid sheep would live in these places unless they were there for extremely high-paid work that they couldn't get elsewhere, because obviously they could save more money if they lived and worked elsewhere.
Hey, hey, I've got equal disdain for lots of VHCOL places. Yeah, I'm looking askance at you Bay Area. But I feel what you're saying, and I think it's compatible with the environmental piece of mustachianism. I think cities are better for the environment vs spread out development. If it was up to me, I'd probably live in a more urban place than we do, but my SO likes having space and easy parking. We've hit a decent balance I think as I learned her family thinks our area is too built-up. But we like having all our groceries and restaurant options within a 5 to 15 minute drive.
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The last thing we need in this country is greenfield development. We have more than enough developed land to house ten times our current population. The forests and farmland should stay as such for the sake of the environment.
I'm not arguing - but *if* it is happening, best we build smart. Instead, we build as many parking garages as multi-family buildings, and limit areas where you could walk for a reason to a couple of blocks (half of buildings in which are, again, garages).
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The system reinforced itself.
Yeah, it's almost as if when you socialize the costs of low density (highway construction, pollution) and privatize the benefits (more space, exclusive schools), lots of people will take the hint.
If the carrot also needs a stick, we'll concentrate social dysfunction (housing instability, addiction, and the resultant crime) in walkable locations and localize the costs of dealing with it.
Between the carrots and sticks, I get how lots of people eventually saddle up for the exurban commute.
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I really think where I am living now is my ideal. It's a small town on the shore with one main street - I can walk to my doctor, library, bank, yoga, post office, town hall, train station to NYC, a few happy hours, coffee shops, pastry/ice cream shops, grocery stores, book shop, masseuse, hair salons, liquor stores, several churches if I were so inclined, a small theater, and there's a nice 6 mile shoreline loop where I can run around basically the whole thing past several small beaches - 12 miles if I'd rather do a short bike ride and meander a bit more. But because I'm in CT, it's not like I'm surrounded by nothing. It's a whole bunch of small shoreline towns with similar main street setups kind of chained together. I have almost everything I need within walking distance, but if I want something else I don't have to drive very far to get it - Costco, for instance, is a 15 minute drive and the ferry to several different islands with great biking is 20 minutes away. Airport is an hour drive, which is about the farthest I need to go in any direction.
I think for me my current setup is ideal. We live in an older suburb 25 miles outside of Chicago. My part of it is older houses on .15 acre lots (50x125’) so everything is SFH but very dense. I live 3 blocks north of the library which is the northern part of our downtown; from there it’s a handful of blocks to restaurants, shopping, grocery store, night life, farmer’s market in the summer, and the train that will take you to downtown Chicago in about 35 minutes. My house, while expensive at around $750k, would cost at least $1M more if it was in a downtown Chicago neighborhood, and $2M more if I had equivalent rated schools that I do here. We’ve talked about a condo in the city center after our kids go to college/move out, but honestly the pandemic has really turned us off that idea. Having plenty of space to do things at home, plus our own green space, has been invaluable during the pandemic and if we ever do it again I’d hate to be trapped in a high rise or something without our own outdoor space.
These both sound similar to where I live, with one important difference. The small town I'm in is more isolated then either of these places and we do no have a rail link to anywhere. I love where I live, but public transport to a larger city would make it just about perfect. On the plus side, I bought my ideal house here for less than $250k.
That is the downside of ideal location...housing cost. We hacked it by getting a tiny cottage for 150k as a foreclosure a few years ago before all the NYC pandemic refugees poured in and jacked up housing costs, but it's a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom 600 sq ft place, and I'd prefer an extra bedroom and half bath, some more closet space - maybe 1000 sq ft. I would have to pay at least 500-600k right now for something that size and it would still need a lot of work. But my running route is so gorgeous that I spend a lot of my time outdoors and just live with the smaller house.
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That is the downside of ideal location...housing cost. We hacked it by getting a tiny cottage for 150k as a foreclosure a few years ago before all the NYC pandemic refugees poured in and jacked up housing costs, but it's a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom 600 sq ft place, and I'd prefer an extra bedroom and half bath, some more closet space - maybe 1000 sq ft. I would have to pay at least 500-600k right now for something that size
I doubt the cost of housing in desirable areas will see a meaningful decline. Perhaps the opposite. If we transition to a work-from-home/in-office hybrid, the suburbs and exurbs will become even more desirable…and more expensive.
The only solution I see for affordability is for lower- and middle-income wages to rise and a higher net worth requirement for anyone contemplating retirement who might want to trade up someday.
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The system reinforced itself.
Yeah, it's almost as if when you socialize the costs of low density (highway construction, pollution) and privatize the benefits (more space, exclusive schools), lots of people will take the hint.
If the carrot also needs a stick, we'll concentrate social dysfunction (housing instability, addiction, and the resultant crime) in walkable locations and localize the costs of dealing with it.
Between the carrots and sticks, I get how lots of people eventually saddle up for the exurban commute.
Glad you mention social dysfunction as a cause for people spreading out into low density cities. Just ask a resident of a suburban sprawl area why they don't live in the city core, and they'll explain how the crime, beggars, addicts, etc. make it an unpleasant place for them and their kids. Gated suburban/exurban communities are telling us that people feel insecure.
It seems lots of people have a vision for what a functional high density city would look like, but this vision cannot be sold because the problem is other people's behavior. I.e. if you build it, the addicts will still be there hassling people on every street corner, the gangs that sell them drugs will still be committing acts of violence, etc. The drug trade, being underground, is more efficient in dense areas.
Our inability to address the problem of substance abuse and addiction is the root cause of sprawl, car culture, and architectural dysfunction. HCOL and VHCOL places with high urban density "work" to the extent that economic segregation causes a steady outflow of addicts to less expensive places. I.e. if you are a heroin addict, paying $3k/mo in rent and holding down a job that can cover that amount is that much harder. You'll eventually end up in a cheaper place, no less addicted. This cheaper place might be a "ghetto" in a less-expensive city, which only discourages people from investing in such cities. Thus, the urban life in SanFrancisco or Boston is prohibitively expensive, and in places like Tulsa, OK, Memphis, TN, Montgomery, AL, Kansas City, MO, Cincinnati, OH etc. you can buy a livable house for under $100k. Guess where the addicts are going, and guess which cities are becoming hollowed out and sprawling.
If addiction treatment was offered to everyone on the taxpayer's dime, addicts and the drug trade would become less common. Taxpayers then might be spared a lot of emergency medial bills, road construction, commute costs, gated community HOAs, law enforcement, utility infrastructure costs, etc. and in addition there would be more taxpayers to carry this burden. Unfortunately, the American way of thinking would see this as somehow rewarding their behavior. We'd rather pay the enormous expenses we're paying and live with dystopian hour long commutes than having a nationwide rehab program. If we only got half the addicts off the streets, LCOL cities would become plausible places again.
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That is the downside of ideal location...housing cost. We hacked it by getting a tiny cottage for 150k as a foreclosure a few years ago before all the NYC pandemic refugees poured in and jacked up housing costs, but it's a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom 600 sq ft place, and I'd prefer an extra bedroom and half bath, some more closet space - maybe 1000 sq ft. I would have to pay at least 500-600k right now for something that size and it would still need a lot of work. But my running route is so gorgeous that I spend a lot of my time outdoors and just live with the smaller house.
That Strong Towns article linked above argues that housing costs are only high for desirable neighborhoods (and cities) because we build so few good neighborhoods (and cities). Rather than the seemingly common reaction of disdaining those neighborhoods as "for the elite", maybe we should try to build a whole hell of a lot more of them.
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That is the downside of ideal location...housing cost. We hacked it by getting a tiny cottage for 150k as a foreclosure a few years ago before all the NYC pandemic refugees poured in and jacked up housing costs, but it's a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom 600 sq ft place, and I'd prefer an extra bedroom and half bath, some more closet space - maybe 1000 sq ft. I would have to pay at least 500-600k right now for something that size and it would still need a lot of work. But my running route is so gorgeous that I spend a lot of my time outdoors and just live with the smaller house.
That Strong Towns article linked above argues that housing costs are only high for desirable neighborhoods (and cities) because we build so few good neighborhoods (and cities). Rather than the seeming common reaction of disdaining those neighborhoods as "for the elite", maybe we should try to build a whole hell of a lot more of them.
I recall reading (I think it started in a post on this forum, and then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on it) about some country that doesn't centralize the federal operations. They spread them out. So instead of mashing everything into DC, the Department of Transportation might be in Omaha and the the Federal Reserve in Nashville, HUD in Detroit, etc. I think shift to that model, at least partially, would help build up at least a handful of areas into more desirable places, because you would bring a lot of dense jobs, many of which are very well paying and quite stable.
You wouldn't want to move those things to cities that are already huge, but you probably need them in places where there is at least some existing infastructure. Plopping them in the middle of miles of untouched land in Nebraska doesn't seem ideal to me. But you could bring some 2nd or 3rd tier cities up to 1st tier cities (in terms of income, and the resulting growth in opportunities, amenities, and options). Of course, even the suggestion of this would cause politicians to go into an terrible frenzy and the chance of things ending up in places that makes sense instead of in the home states of committee members is next to zero, but if we could pull it off, I think it would go a long way toward making more areas into desirable places to live.
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That Strong Towns article linked above argues that housing costs are only high for desirable neighborhoods (and cities) because we build so few good neighborhoods (and cities). Rather than the seeming common reaction of disdaining those neighborhoods as "for the elite", maybe we should try to build a whole hell of a lot more of them.
This is one of the idiosyncrasies of the American left - it's choke full of people who would love to live in a good dense neighborhood, but it more often than not uses it's political power to prevent building these neighborhoods.
At the end of the day, the only way to meet demand is with supply, and the demand is clearly there.
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I recall reading (I think it started in a post on this forum, and then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on it) about some country that doesn't centralize the federal operations. They spread them out. So instead of mashing everything into DC, the Department of Transportation might be in Omaha and the the Federal Reserve in Nashville, HUD in Detroit, etc. I think shift to that model, at least partially, would help build up at least a handful of areas into more desirable places, because you would bring a lot of dense jobs, many of which are very well paying and quite stable.
US already does that - although we should do more of it. CDC headquarters, for example, are in Atlanta. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service recently moved to Kansas City. Unsurprisingly, Republican Senators push really hard for agencies to be moved to their states.
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Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
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I recall reading (I think it started in a post on this forum, and then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on it) about some country that doesn't centralize the federal operations. They spread them out. So instead of mashing everything into DC, the Department of Transportation might be in Omaha and the the Federal Reserve in Nashville, HUD in Detroit, etc. I think shift to that model, at least partially, would help build up at least a handful of areas into more desirable places, because you would bring a lot of dense jobs, many of which are very well paying and quite stable.
You're probably thinking about Switzerland. They don't have a capital city (although Bern is the most capital-like).
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That is the downside of ideal location...housing cost. We hacked it by getting a tiny cottage for 150k as a foreclosure a few years ago before all the NYC pandemic refugees poured in and jacked up housing costs, but it's a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom 600 sq ft place, and I'd prefer an extra bedroom and half bath, some more closet space - maybe 1000 sq ft. I would have to pay at least 500-600k right now for something that size and it would still need a lot of work. But my running route is so gorgeous that I spend a lot of my time outdoors and just live with the smaller house.
That Strong Towns article linked above argues that housing costs are only high for desirable neighborhoods (and cities) because we build so few good neighborhoods (and cities). Rather than the seeming common reaction of disdaining those neighborhoods as "for the elite", maybe we should try to build a whole hell of a lot more of them.
Indeed! High housing costs are largely about the land. Building materials don't cost a whole lot more in San Francisco than Nebraska, labor is more expensive to be sure, but what makes the biggest difference is simply the land.
I live in a desirable, walkable neighborhood. Even though my home is quite spacious the tax assessor believes the value of my property lies more in the land than in the house itself. And yet, local zoning prohibits me from splitting up the land into smaller, more affordable chunks. The most I could do at this moment is build a small one-bedroom cottage in the back yard. Simply selling the yard and letting someone build a full-sized house in the empty chunk has been banned for the better part of a century. We have a situation where adding additional housing to existing walkable neighborhoods is tightly restricted, and so is adding more walkability to existing non-walkable neighborhoods. It's madness.
Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
I'm a parent. There are trade-offs. We have a small yard where the kids play sometimes, but they're still not old enough that we can just send them out unsupervised. If they need adult supervision anyway, might as well spend some of that time walking the 15 minutes to a park with better play equipment than we'd ever even dream about buying for our own property. I think in a number of years (late elementary through high school years), living in a location with good walkability and transit will become a real benefit. In a car-oriented suburb if your kid is to do pretty much anything outside the home they need a parental chauffeur. I grew up in such a place. In nice weather, during daylight hours, it was possible for me to bike to the library or the school or a few other places, but it took at least half an hour each way and this was less of a safe option at night or in winter. There was no transit service to speak of. It would have been incredibly liberating as a middle schooler to be able to get myself places rather than rely on a parent for everything, and the parent would appreciate not needing to go along every time as well.
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Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
Most of my childhood went in urban environment, although, admittedly, not in the US. I had orders of magnitude more freedom and opportunities to entertain myself outside of home, unsupervised, than US suburban kids have today.
I cannot discount American parents' preference for suburbs completely, there must be some reason for that. And we raised our kids in suburbs, so there's that. But whatever it is that pushes American parents out of cities, it is not a property of urban environment in and of itself, it's a property of American urban environment.
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The thing is that even though living in a walkable town is expensive in terms of housing costs (not Mustachian), it is offset to a certain extent by being able to walk almost everywhere (Mustachian), and I know I feel a lot healthier and walk a lot more every day since I moved to this town. I feel like we cheated by getting a tiny house, and there's a limited stock of those, but we sort of get to have our cake and eat it too this way. My town has an interesting mix of tiny beach cottages and massive summer homes. So you have the uber rich seasonal residents with their mega yachts and the places that cater to them which are priced accordingly, but also more working class people in small homes and even some apartments buildings/condos that are more reasonably priced.
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Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
The first Youtube link in my original post is directly about this topic!
I initially wrote a much longer response but it seems silly for me try to speak about this when I obviously have no experience with kids, so I'll let him do the talking - highly recommend that video on why cities are great places to raise kids (with some caveats re: North America vs EU).
On the other hand, I do have experience being a kid growing up in suburbia, and the inability to get anywhere I wanted to go without someone to drive me was a severe negative that is hard to over-state. The same things that make it possible to live car-free in dense urban areas also make it way more fun and interesting to be a person who's too young to drive.
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The thing is that even though living in a walkable town is expensive in terms of housing costs (not Mustachian), it is offset to a certain extent by being able to walk almost everywhere (Mustachian), and I know I feel a lot healthier and walk a lot more every day since I moved to this town.
If you see something priced cheaply on eBay, there's a good chance that the shipping cost is high. We should look at the cheap real estate available in suburbia / exurbia as having a high shipping cost too, because you'll have to ship yourself extreme distances to go to work, meet up with others, or buy something from the store. The costs of car usage is this shipping bill. I would like to see an economist build an equation to estimate the fair market value of housing at greater and greater distances. It wouldn't surprise me to see some economic inefficiencies, because the cost of transportation is a lot less visible than house prices and square footage.
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Posting mostly to follow the conversation. A podcast I was listening to a couple of weeks pointed out that Paris is one of the densest cities around, but does not feel dense at the neighborhood level because of how the neighborhoods are constructed. A study I came across on the concept is translated, but makes the point that streets with similar style and shape/size buildings feel less dense than less homogeneous 'hoods. Similarly, having the functions you need nearby (food, cafe, etc) helps. I thought it was pretty interesting, and a good layer to put over the cost discussion.
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/real-density-versus-experienced-density-paris-le-de-france-france/249701/
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Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
The first Youtube link in my original post is directly about this topic!
I initially wrote a much longer response but it seems silly for me try to speak about this when I obviously have no experience with kids, so I'll let him do the talking - highly recommend that video on why cities are great places to raise kids (with some caveats re: North America vs EU).
On the other hand, I do have experience being a kid growing up in suburbia, and the inability to get anywhere I wanted to go without someone to drive me was a severe negative that is hard to over-state. The same things that make it possible to live car-free in dense urban areas also make it way more fun and interesting to be a person who's too young to drive.
I watched the video. That makes sense. I thought we were only talking about US cities. I haven't been to one yet that I would let a less than 15 yr old wander around in by themselves.
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If you see something priced cheaply on eBay, there's a good chance that the shipping cost is high. We should look at the cheap real estate available in suburbia / exurbia as having a high shipping cost too, because you'll have to ship yourself extreme distances to go to work, meet up with others, or buy something from the store. The costs of car usage is this shipping bill. I would like to see an economist build an equation to estimate the fair market value of housing at greater and greater distances. It wouldn't surprise me to see some economic inefficiencies, because the cost of transportation is a lot less visible than house prices and square footage.
This is true, and there are even some numbers under true Cost of Commuting (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/). It becomes much less relevant if you WFH or are already FIREd, though. It then basically becomes a quality of life issue, and if the increase in quality of life is worth the extra $$. My hunch is that for people who don't regularly exercise, the health benefits of being in an environment that encourages (or even requires) walking will pay for themselves. If you exercise regularly regardless, there may be no financial benefit.
To illustrate: one company I worked for did this walking challenge. It was a startup full of highly competitive people, most of whom couldn't pass on a chance to win at anything and really worked to get the step count up.
Our European office won just by living its regular life.
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https://youtu.be/ypfphHu_ewI
The title of this video might make it seem very dry and irrelevant to non-lawyer folk, but it’s really just a riff on Chuck Marohn’s normal Strong Towns presentation that I found very compelling. The failure of suburban sprawl to generate productivity and wealth is directly linked to declining prosperity for the people. There’s a reason people remember the 50s so fondly, and it’s because none of the debt of the Growth Ponzi scheme had come due, and the people benefited personally from all that fake wealth that newly developed cities could throw around. This is what all these “explaining 21st century expenses to Boomers” memes are (indirectly) talking about. When our built places fail to generate value, of course that means there is less wealth in the system for our people to share in.
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https://youtu.be/ypfphHu_ewI
The title of this video might make it seem very dry and irrelevant to non-lawyer folk, but it’s really just a riff on Chuck Marohn’s normal Strong Towns presentation that I found very compelling. The failure of suburban sprawl to generate productivity and wealth is directly linked to declining prosperity for the people. There’s a reason people remember the 50s so fondly, and it’s because none of the debt of the Growth Ponzi scheme had come due, and the people benefited personally from all that fake wealth that newly developed cities could throw around. This is what all these “explaining 21st century expenses to Boomers” memes are (indirectly) talking about. When our built places fail to generate value, of course that means there is less wealth in the system for our people to share in.
God, that was quite depressing.
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I that something not really being mentioned here is that for the most part, condos seem like horrific uses of money. I know that this is fundamentally a scarcity problem that lets our homes cost so damn much in the first place that they become a large portion of our net worth. Still, when I look at my 400k house with a $1400 month PITI payment where 600$/month goes to principle and then compare it to a condo where the condo fee alone is $600-800/month, it makes me cringe hard. Home ownership isn't free, but for my standalone structures, I've averaged ~$350/month for all work that has gone into my houses, including light renos here and there.
My parents are looking to downsize and have less yard maintenance, but when they see giant condo fees (one of the places they looked at had a $1400 condo fee for a 350k 2/2 unit, insane) they just throw their hands up in the air and decide to stay in their 1 acre, 2500 square foot, 4/3 home. I can't believe that other people aren't in the same spot.
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I that something not really being mentioned here is that for the most part, condos seem like horrific uses of money. I know that this is fundamentally a scarcity problem that lets our homes cost so damn much in the first place that they become a large portion of our net worth. Still, when I look at my 400k house with a $1400 month PITI payment where 600$/month goes to principle and then compare it to a condo where the condo fee alone is $600-800/month, it makes me cringe hard. Home ownership isn't free, but for my standalone structures, I've averaged ~$350/month for all work that has gone into my houses, including light renos here and there.
My parents are looking to downsize and have less yard maintenance, but when they see giant condo fees (one of the places they looked at had a $1400 condo fee for a 350k 2/2 unit, insane) they just throw their hands up in the air and decide to stay in their 1 acre, 2500 square foot, 4/3 home. I can't believe that other people aren't in the same spot.
Yes, condo fees are high - but that's the price you pay for hiring someone else to do all that maintenance for you.
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Condo fees are, in fact, insane. Even for condos that are, in fact, townhouses. Every place I looked, these fees are one of the biggest barriers to our plans to downsize. The most economical way to downsize I see at the moment is to get a SFH and rent a part of it out. Or rent, which comes with own drawbacks.
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Not all townhouse-like buildings have a condo association. In my town there are plenty of these types of building, some with party walls, some without. But none of them have condo fees.
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Yes, in my LCOL area condo fees are about half the entire mortgage for comparable SFH's. Yes, SFH's are enormously expensive to maintain, but most people don't expect to spend thousands of dollars per year on just the exterior portions of the building that are covered by condo associations.
The inefficiency is that with a condo, you're paying for a lot of things that aren't your personal private property and don't exist with a SFH:
1) Common areas, elevators, and parking garages, if applicable
2) Condo management, if not done on a volunteer basis
3) Landscaping contractors
4) A political process where some condo board members want X and some want Y, so they compromise, get both, and raise the fee.
For these reasons, I wonder if a new format is needed for dense housing. Townhouses or narrow-lot SFHs without property associations seem like a cheaper way to live in cities. Even if you can only get 2 stories this way, that's still 4-6x the density of suburbs, and avoids a lot of the costs of going higher such as parking garages, sprinkler systems, common areas, elevators, fire escapes, skyscraper-grade materials, water supply pumps, and the added costs of construction and maintenance at great heights.
OTOH, a suburban/rural SFH includes a car and long commute as part of its configuration. People mentally categorize the car/commute as "something I get to have" whereas they categorize the condo fee as "something I have to pay for" but really they are substitutes for one another and the money comes out of your pocket either way. Perhaps the most mustachian solution is to find a niche where you can avoid paying for either, or at least pay the minimum for either.
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OTOH, a suburban/rural SFH includes a car and long commute as part of its configuration.
At one time, sure, but with all the remote work opportunities I don't this this is true anymore. You can live in the suburbs and not commute.
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OTOH, a suburban/rural SFH includes a car and long commute as part of its configuration. People mentally categorize the car/commute as "something I get to have" whereas they categorize the condo fee as "something I have to pay for" but really they are substitutes for one another and the money comes out of your pocket either way. Perhaps the most mustachian solution is to find a niche where you can avoid paying for either, or at least pay the minimum for either.
This is absolutely fair, and it's a factor for the accumulation phase if commuting to an office/job site, but it becomes much less of a factor if you WFH. I only need groceries once a week. I don't need a library daily, either. In this case, a cheap (and cheap to maintain) car can easily allow you to come ahead financially.
Plus, if you DIY, you can maintain a SFH much, much cheaper than what it cost a condo association to maintain a condo building for you. Ditto with landscaping/snow removal.
This also jives with the geo-arbitrage topic. You can (unless I'm missing something) own a condo-like living space in Southern Europe w/o insane condo fees. It's much more difficult to do it in the US.
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…For these reasons, I wonder if a new format is needed for dense housing. Townhouses or narrow-lot SFHs without property associations seem like a cheaper way to live in cities. Even if you can only get 2 stories this way, that's still 4-6x the density of suburbs, and avoids a lot of the costs of going higher such as parking garages, sprinkler systems, common areas, elevators, fire escapes, skyscraper-grade materials, water supply pumps, and the added costs of construction and maintenance at great heights.
OTOH, a suburban/rural SFH includes a car and long commute as part of its configuration. People mentally categorize the car/commute as "something I get to have" whereas they categorize the condo fee as "something I have to pay for" but really they are substitutes for one another and the money comes out of your pocket either way. Perhaps the most mustachian solution is to find a niche where you can avoid paying for either, or at least pay the minimum for either.
I don’t think any “new format” is needed—just a legalization of traditional forms of development that have been made illegal by setback requirements and parking minimums and other crap. We’re always looking for ~new~ and ~innovative~ solutions to problems (just look at Elon Musk’s whole hyperloop grift where he designed… a crappier less effective subway, but made it look great with futuristic looking graphical renderings), but in terms of urbanism a lot of our solutions already exist, it’s just about accumulating the political will to let different kinds of housing be built again.
(https://www.sfweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/shutterstock_1142165786-scaled.jpg)
This kind of single-family construction has maybe been disastrous for San Francisco because it’s a massive boomtown that is geographically confined by being on a peninsula, but allowing this kind of construction could be a great incremental step up in density for places that are currently more sprawling. This could satisfy a lot of the demand for SFH-style and condo-style living, without condo fees or a yard to maintain.
And here’s an article that explicitly mentions cutting back on costs like sprinkler systems that make “missing middle” development economically unfeasible: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/26/a-trailblazing-reform-supports-small-scale-development-in-memphis (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/26/a-trailblazing-reform-supports-small-scale-development-in-memphis)
Also fully agreed on car costs. Some others have suggested that the car commute is not a requirement with work-from-home, but that dances around the fact that sprawling suburbs are just toxic and unpleasant places to try to exist in without a car. Walking in the unprotected bike lane with traffic zipping by at 40mph because there’s no sidewalk gets old pretty fast.
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Standing ovation for the eloquent point about tried and true solutions in urban design.
Being one of the dancers around, I'll point out that more modern suburbs have sidewalks and walking paths. I live in one. I like walking, but I never reached the end of the trail system after starting from home on foot. A car is still a necessity, since paths lead to nowhere useful (well, nowhere except schools and parks).
I do agree that in the grand scheme of things, suburbs like mine cannot be a solution. Not everyone can WFH. There's simply no space for every human on Earth to live at this density. They are by definition exclusionary. But they are the opposite of toxic and unpleasant, which makes them very hard to kill.
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OTOH, a suburban/rural SFH includes a car and long commute as part of its configuration. People mentally categorize the car/commute as "something I get to have" whereas they categorize the condo fee as "something I have to pay for" but really they are substitutes for one another and the money comes out of your pocket either way. Perhaps the most mustachian solution is to find a niche where you can avoid paying for either, or at least pay the minimum for either.
This is absolutely fair, and it's a factor for the accumulation phase if commuting to an office/job site, but it becomes much less of a factor if you WFH. I only need groceries once a week. I don't need a library daily, either. In this case, a cheap (and cheap to maintain) car can easily allow you to come ahead financially.
Plus, if you DIY, you can maintain a SFH much, much cheaper than what it cost a condo association to maintain a condo building for you. Ditto with landscaping/snow removal.
The WFH + suburban SFH configuration may be simultaneously optimizing for housing costs and transportation costs for individuals, but it does not address the long-term infrastructure costs illustrated by the Strong Towns videos. However, it seems likely that city residents will end up paying the costs to re-infrastructure the suburbs. They already are, so that's a point in favor of living in suburbs.
It's also a somewhat risky gambit considering that most people stick with a job for ~3 years. Will your next job be WFH? This question could become really important next time we have a recession and the jobs dry up. Still, the SFH+old car combo might win in the long run if one has bouts of WFH and commuting, because those condo fees are due every month regardless. However, if one transitioned from WFH to commuting, one would probably have to upgrade the car to get to work reliably. This upgrade requirement might come at the worst possible time when you have the least cash to spend. I.e. you've lost your WFH job to the recession and now you're settling on a job in the city that might even pay less.
It's also not 100% clear because even if a WFH person owns a ratty, old, high-mileage car with liability-only insurance that is only used occasionally, they've still got to cover a lot of repairs and maintenance to even keep that basic car road-worthy. Tires dry-rot in 4-5 years whether they wear out or not. Then there's coolant flushes, hoses and belts, brake caliper rebuilds, depreciation of maybe $100/mo, property tax, tag fees, incidental repairs, and maybe $1000-$1500/year for liability only insurance. Then there's the risk of 80-100% loss in the event of theft, vandalism, or sudden engine/transmission failure. Even then, you'll probably have to suffer whatever costs are involved with trading such a car every few years at the point when it's no longer worth having.
It's really hard to own a car for less than $2k per year, so there is a floor on the expenses if you live in the suburbs or a rural area. This floor is similar to a condo fee (although the urban condo doesn't waste as much of your time with a commute or lawn mowing).
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The WFH + suburban SFH configuration may be simultaneously optimizing for housing costs and transportation costs for individuals, but it does not address the long-term infrastructure costs illustrated by the Strong Towns videos.
Yes. Pretty much classic tragedy of the commons.
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What working definitions of urban, suburban, and exurban are people going by?
I have a city address and live on a grid-patterned street but I'd describe the surroundings around my SFH and neighborhood as suburban, albeit it's very walkable/bikable. "Downtown" is a 10 minute drive away. There are some multi-unit buildings in my zip code (maybe 20-30% of all residential buildings). These are mostly 2 or 4 units in large, old brick houses and the 10+ story apartment/condo complexes are non-existent. There are plenty of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, salons, boutiques, gyms, dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc. all walkable and nearby but these businesses are usually housed in their own small shops/buildings and not in a strip mall with a parking lot or a multi story office building. Several bus routes run through on streets that are within 2 blocks of my house and connect to the metro (or is a 10 min bike ride) but most adults seem to have their own car and park on the street or in their garage.
Am I adding to the suburban problem or helping the urban one? I'm not sure but am open to being educated. I WFH and my wife does commute 25 min to work although her work is a school out in the "real" burbs and not downtown.
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What working definitions of urban, suburban, and exurban are people going by?
I have a city address and live on a grid-patterned street but I'd describe the surroundings around my SFH and neighborhood as suburban, albeit it's very walkable/bikable. "Downtown" is a 10 minute drive away. There are some multi-unit buildings in my zip code (maybe 20-30% of all residential buildings). These are mostly 2 or 4 units in large, old brick houses and the 10+ story apartment/condo complexes are non-existent. There are plenty of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, salons, boutiques, gyms, dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc. all walkable and nearby but these businesses are usually housed in their own small shops/buildings and not in a strip mall with a parking lot or a multi story office building. Several bus routes run through on streets that are within 2 blocks of my house and connect to the metro (or is a 10 min bike ride) but most adults seem to have their own car and park on the street or in their garage.
Am I adding to the suburban problem or helping the urban one? I'm not sure but am open to being educated. I WFH and my wife does commute 25 min to work although her work is a school out in the "real" burbs and not downtown.
I would call that barely urban. In some places where SFH's were built in the early 20th century, you have a mix of moderate urban density and roads built for cars. I'd call it suburban when the streets are no longer arranged in squares, the SFH lots are more than 50' wide, and there is minimal public transportation. Much of St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, etc. meet this description.
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I made some calculations to make sure the exemples that StrongTowns brings about wealth and incomes were the same here
I live in Lévis, Québec where the population is 150,000 the sprall is the only way to go for the last 70 years
Small "mom & pop" shops built between 1910-1950 on a commercial street are paying 65-75,000$ per acre/year
Meanwhile, big boxes (Dolarama, Costco) built in the 2000's are more in the 50-55,000$ range
We also have a lot of used car dealers who pay less than 20,000$ per acre! (cheap building with large parking lot)
I did not checked for the residential but asume the result would be alike
The land is not used in a very efficient way, to much parking, etc. and the result is to much street, pipes, sidewalks and a lot of "gaps" between every places. I do ride my bike a lot but it's not a pleasant place to bike though...
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It's also not 100% clear because even if a WFH person owns a ratty, old, high-mileage car with liability-only insurance that is only used occasionally, they've still got to cover a lot of repairs and maintenance to even keep that basic car road-worthy. Tires dry-rot in 4-5 years whether they wear out or not. Then there's coolant flushes, hoses and belts, brake caliper rebuilds, depreciation of maybe $100/mo, property tax, tag fees, incidental repairs, and maybe $1000-$1500/year for liability only insurance. Then there's the risk of 80-100% loss in the event of theft, vandalism, or sudden engine/transmission failure. Even then, you'll probably have to suffer whatever costs are involved with trading such a car every few years at the point when it's no longer worth having.
It's really hard to own a car for less than $2k per year, so there is a floor on the expenses if you live in the suburbs or a rural area. This floor is similar to a condo fee (although the urban condo doesn't waste as much of your time with a commute or lawn mowing).
Depends on where you live and how much you DIY I suppose.
You might call BS on this but my 305K ~22 year old Honda is still running most of the original hoses. The antifreeze has been replaced each time I replace the timing belt every ~100K miles and a couple times in between b/c when the original radiator started leaking, I replaced it with an aftermarket rad that lasted ~13 months (1 month out of warranty of course). The NAPA radiator (third radiator) has been fine for years now. My Chevy of a similar age is also running much of its original hoses and the original radiator. Both cars are running the original calipers. Chevy is on the second pads, Honda on the third set of pads. Chevy has original brake shoes on the back. Honda on the second set.
When the engine suddenly failed a few years ago in this Honda (oil pump failed, was already a worn engine), I replaced it with a used JDM engine for ~$650 plus ~$400 worth of shipping and semi-DIY installation. Paid for it cash out of pocket.
I think cars are just this good these days. Perhaps life is different in the land of salty roads. Maybe the cost of rusting a car into nothingness is another reason to not live and drive where they heavily salt the roads. I noticed this morning that our streets department sprayed the streets with beet juice in anticipation of a possible snow tonight.
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My condo/townhouse could sell right now for probably between $800k-850k. The condo fees are $120/mo. That includes all the yard work and access to a pool. (I rent it out but when we lived in it, I used the pool rarely.)
Not all condos and townhouses have insane fees. Or insane rules.
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What working definitions of urban, suburban, and exurban are people going by?
I have a city address and live on a grid-patterned street but I'd describe the surroundings around my SFH and neighborhood as suburban, albeit it's very walkable/bikable. "Downtown" is a 10 minute drive away. There are some multi-unit buildings in my zip code (maybe 20-30% of all residential buildings). These are mostly 2 or 4 units in large, old brick houses and the 10+ story apartment/condo complexes are non-existent. There are plenty of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, salons, boutiques, gyms, dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc. all walkable and nearby but these businesses are usually housed in their own small shops/buildings and not in a strip mall with a parking lot or a multi story office building. Several bus routes run through on streets that are within 2 blocks of my house and connect to the metro (or is a 10 min bike ride) but most adults seem to have their own car and park on the street or in their garage.
Am I adding to the suburban problem or helping the urban one? I'm not sure but am open to being educated. I WFH and my wife does commute 25 min to work although her work is a school out in the "real" burbs and not downtown.
I would call that barely urban. In some places where SFH's were built in the early 20th century, you have a mix of moderate urban density and roads built for cars. I'd call it suburban when the streets are no longer arranged in squares, the SFH lots are more than 50' wide, and there is minimal public transportation. Much of St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, etc. meet this description.
I have a city address and live on a grid-patterned street but I'd describe the surroundings around my SFH and neighborhood as suburban, albeit it's very walkable/bikable. "Downtown" is a 10 minute drive away. There are some multi-unit buildings in my zip code (maybe 20-30% of all residential buildings). These are mostly 2 or 4 units in large, old brick houses and the 10+ story apartment/condo complexes are non-existent. There are plenty of bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, salons, boutiques, gyms, dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc. all walkable and nearby but these businesses are usually housed in their own small shops/buildings and not in a strip mall with a parking lot or a multi story office building. Several bus routes run through on streets that are within 2 blocks of my house and connect to the metro (or is a 10 min bike ride) but most adults seem to have their own car and park on the street or in their garage.
Am I adding to the suburban problem or helping the urban one? I'm not sure but am open to being educated. I WFH and my wife does commute 25 min to work although her work is a school out in the "real" burbs and not downtown.
I'm in an early 20th century neighborhood like you describe. 50' wide lots, with multifamily units on lots of the corners.
What's sad to me is that while this is still a somewhat walkable neighborhood, it used to be much better. Now, it's a 15 minute walk each way to a small format chain grocer.
But pre-WWII, there were corner stores all over the place. I bet the vast majority of people were within five blocks of a grocery store. The shop windows are still apparent if you look for them, but now almost all of them have been turned into residential units and the old storefront windows are someone's living room picture windows.
Cars + supermarkets + big box retail managed to turn what used to be a very walkable neighborhood into one where it's possible but tough. Yes, prices came down, but there were major costs to the community and lifestyle.
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I'm in an early 20th century neighborhood like you describe. 50' wide lots, with multifamily units on lots of the corners.
What's sad to me is that while this is still a somewhat walkable neighborhood, it used to be much better. Now, it's a 15 minute walk each way to a small format chain grocer.
But pre-WWII, there were corner stores all over the place. I bet the vast majority of people were within five blocks of a grocery store. The shop windows are still apparent if you look for them, but now almost all of them have been turned into residential units and the old storefront windows are someone's living room picture windows.
Cars + supermarkets + big box retail managed to turn what used to be a very walkable neighborhood into one where it's possible but tough. Yes, prices came down, but there were major costs to the community and lifestyle.
Plenty of areas in Seattle are like this. Before zoning, someone could just put a small store in front of their house if they wanted, and lots of people did just that! You can see the evidence of these storefronts all over the place: someone has a house built right up next to the sidewalk when none of the neighboring houses are, and it has a really huge window in front. Once single-use zoning took hold the existing businesses were allowed to keep operating as a "non-conforming use." There are a couple of these buildings on a corner two blocks from my house: one hosts a yoga studio with an apartment above, and the other hosts a naturopath and and an architecture office. These are the types of quiet neighborhood-friendly businesses that nobody has any good reason to object to having next to their house, but it would be illegal to build them new today in that location. These particular storefronts have been allowed to keep operating because they've hosted operating businesses continuously for most of a century. In other buildings where the non-conforming shop closed up and the space was converted to a residence, there's no going back. The population density is still high enough in my area that there are convenience stores within a short walk of my house, and a couple of major supermarkets about a mile away, but many neighborhoods are not so fortunate.
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But pre-WWII, there were corner stores all over the place. I bet the vast majority of people were within five blocks of a grocery store. The shop windows are still apparent if you look for them, but now almost all of them have been turned into residential units and the old storefront windows are someone's living room picture windows.
A new corner store just opened up down the block from me in response to the only grocery store in town closing. They have perhaps 10% of the inventory the grocery store had, but they've got all the essentials, the quality is actually better (they sell local sourced meat and veg), and prices seem okay. I'm really hoping they are successful.
Cars + supermarkets + big box retail managed to turn what used to be a very walkable neighborhood into one where it's possible but tough. Yes, prices came down, but there were major costs to the community and lifestyle.
I wonder how much of the lower prices this model offers is really just a shift of costs to automobile expenses and the consumers time? That last mile of distribution is expensive-- big box stores make the consumer pay for it (inefficiently).
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Cars + supermarkets + big box retail managed to turn what used to be a very walkable neighborhood into one where it's possible but tough. Yes, prices came down, but there were major costs to the community and lifestyle.
I wonder how much of the lower prices this model offers is really just a shift of costs to automobile expenses and the consumers time? that last mile of distribution is expense, big box stores make the consumer pay for it (inefficiently).
There is definitely some truth to this, and it's a continuum. A place like Costco, there's absolutely no reason to go there without a car. Their business model relies entirely on bringing people on a longer trip with a car to one of their very few locations in a metro area. The package sizes are large. The prices are lower than supermarkets but the difference is small enough that it's only worth making a trip if you're going to be purchasing a trunk-full of stuff. A more typical supermarket serves more of a neighborhood-scale customer base. Most people don't live in easy walking distance, but in areas where you pretty much need to own a car anyway the added expense of taking that car a mile or three to the supermarket is pretty negligible compared to the amount of money you'll save by not doing all your shopping at the corner store. And if you can manage to split your shopping into small enough chunks that you can carry it home on a bike, all the better.
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I'm really interested in what it will take to get high density suburbs in the US.
Once the houses go up and the roads go in, I think it's tough to change.
Wealthy suburbs will be able to maintain the status quo indefinitely by lobbying for continued subsidies and raising property taxes to whatever level is necessary.
But there are some decaying suburbs that have gotten more dense out of necessity in my city. They're mostly 70s and 80s era 'burbs of poorly/cheaply constructed 2500-3000 sq ft split levels that were never really maintained or updated. They've gotten more dense by simply packing more people into the houses, as is evident by the four cars in the driveway and two or more parked on the street. Some are extended family households, and others have been hashed up into apartments.
There are more people, but none of the benefits like walkability have followed because everything is still zoned for a 1980s suburban lifestyle. Simply having more people in a given area doesn't automatically lead to the benefits of density.
At a minimum, you're going to have to change the zoning (as @seattlecyclone notes), but good luck trying to get transit or businesses back into these decaying cul-de-sacs. I think it's much more likely that as their infrastructure decays and they head toward insolvency, these suburbs will cut services back until the state bails them out by assuming more responsibility for previously-local infrastructure.
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At a minimum, you're going to have to change the zoning (as @seattlecyclone notes), but good luck trying to get transit or businesses back into these decaying cul-de-sacs. I think it's much more likely that as their infrastructure decays and they head toward insolvency, these suburbs will cut services back until the state bails them out by assuming more responsibility for previously-local infrastructure.
I'd like to believe that these areas would get a smattering of hair salons, convenience stores, coffee shops, and other small businesses in converted garages if that were allowed. Perhaps as the business grew more popular they'd build a real storefront in the front yard. People in the working-class neighborhoods of a century ago ran publicly-facing businesses out of their homes; I see little reason the same couldn't be true today. Transit is a much tougher one just because of the way the streets are laid out. See the image below for the difference in the amount of area you can cover in a short walk in a grid-system neighborhood vs. a cul-de-sac neighborhood (maps to the same scale). The street design makes fewer people in walking distance of whatever bus stops you might want to install, which depresses ridership.
(https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/02/Picture-13.png)
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I'd like to believe that these areas would get a smattering of hair salons, convenience stores, coffee shops, and other small businesses in converted garages if that were allowed. Perhaps as the business grew more popular they'd build a real storefront in the front yard. [/img]
I guess I'm quite a bit more pessimistic.
Yes, there could be a financial and lifestyle reckoning in which people are forced to accept that their neighbor is going to run a Quickie Mart out of his garage. But beyond the basic NIMBYism, it would cut against everything that community has ever stood for and represent a public acknowledgement that their lifestyle was a stretch on their best days, and those days are long past.
People are really bad at downward mobility and will fight like hell to avoid the public signs of it.
What I suspect is far more likely is that the rural development model gets extended to the insolvent suburbs.
Here's an example of that model from my state that went into practice fifteen or twenty years ago. We had all of these little towns around the state with municipal wastewater treatment facilities that had reached the end of their lives, and the towns couldn't pay to replace them. In a world where finances forced people to reckon with their lifestyles, these towns would have faced a choice to either levy the taxes needed, which admittedly would have been pretty tough, or close up shop and tell the residents they needed to install septic systems.
But of course neither of those things happened. With the subtext that this was going to be a giant water quality problem as residents just straight piped their sewage into the groundwater if the state didn't fund repairs, we created a grant program to maintain the water treatment in all of the little towns around the state.
Since then, the model has been used to get the state to assume increasing responsibility for county and township roads and bridges, as well as schools. And so the status quo can be maintained decades after its sell-by date.
So why not do the same thing now for all of these broke suburbs? A water pipe replacement program here, a repaving program there, and a topping up of the school funding that's been cut will similarly preserve the veneer of functionality in these places.
Given a choice between a clear change of direction or some state programs to keep things going as-is, I find the second one more likely.
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in areas where you pretty much need to own a car anyway the added expense of taking that car a mile or three to the supermarket is pretty negligible compared to the amount of money you'll save by not doing all your shopping at the corner store.
That's the gist of it. If you have to have a car, there's not much savings in using it less. No incentive to not drive. And since you have no incentive not to drive, your county/city/town has no incentive to invest in anything but car infrastructure. Vicious cycle.
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I'd like to believe that these areas would get a smattering of hair salons, convenience stores, coffee shops, and other small businesses in converted garages if that were allowed. Perhaps as the business grew more popular they'd build a real storefront in the front yard. [/img]
I guess I'm quite a bit more pessimistic.
Yes, there could be a financial and lifestyle reckoning in which people are forced to accept that their neighbor is going to run a Quickie Mart out of his garage. But beyond the basic NIMBYism, it would cut against everything that community has ever stood for and represent a public acknowledgement that their lifestyle was a stretch on their best days, and those days are long past.
People are really bad at downward mobility and will fight like hell to avoid the public signs of it.
I wrote that bit in response to @caleb's comment doubting that businesses would appear even if the zoning changed. Obviously changing the zoning to allow mixed-use buildings would be a prerequisite, and many people wouldn't be in favor. If it did happen though, I think you'd find many people eager to have an opportunity to make some money from space they already have, especially among these multi-generational households or unofficial apartments. I could be wrong though!
I think you're spot on with your prediction that these suburbs will need bailouts to replace local infrastructure as it reaches the end of its useful life. I definitely subscribe to the Strong Towns thesis that this development pattern is financially unsustainable, at least if you assume maintenance must be paid out of property taxes billed at rates that non-rich people are able to pay.
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A stick-built house can be expected to last about 100 years, plus or minus 50 depending on quality and maintenance, and the neighborhood layout will remain until the entire area is abandoned. Those suburban neighborhoods and winding dead-end streets will continue to exist in one way or another for at least the next century before it makes financial sense to bulldoze everything and start over with a new layout.
In my area, there are lots of suburban neighborhoods constructed from the 1950's to 1970's that are experiencing blight, poverty, etc. The lawns are often filled with trash. The driveways are cracked to pieces. The houses have peeling paint, faded siding with pieces missing, cracked windows, and poorly-done DIY additions that often leak and condemn the whole house. Empty lots are common, as it makes no financial sense to replace a house once it burns or deteriorates beyond repair. Murders are common, as are addled drug addicts and drunks wandering the wide streets or sitting in people's yards.
It was impossible in the 1970's or 1980's to imagine these new neighborhoods full of young families becoming slums. Today we can't imagine a neighborhood of 3000sf McMansions ever going into decline, but experience says it will happen. The people who grew up in the neighborhoods that are today's slums moved into newer subdivisions. Their kids will move on too. Those big houses with tacky old-fashioned granite countertops, vintage beige tile, and embarrassing tray ceilings will be rented by groups of roommates organized via online services. The ugly protruding garages will be made into studio apartments to generate more rent. The lawns will revert to natural species, if not messy vegetable gardens with rusty wire fences to keep the drunks out. Blue tarps will be tacked to some roofs, until the money can be found to patch them. As the pipes decay, the houses will be rearranged or abandoned, because concrete slab foundations are uneconomical to jackhammer. As in today's declining suburbs, some people will be left behind to live in the American Dreams of yesteryear.
The question is, where will the relatively wealthy kids who grew up in these places pay to have their own houses built? In even farther-out suburbs, or in vibrant walkable cities? Will suburbia continue to be associated with wealth, or will the next generation see the suburban lifestyle as old-fashioned, impractical, and the way poor people live - packed into tenements made out of decaying tract homes? Will the pandemic generation be accustomed to living on the internet from a remote location, or will they revel in the crowds and connectedness of urban life? Will online disinformation destabilize society and persuade people to live apart from each other like the 1960's to 1990's crime wave did? Or will society bifurcate with urban people living in a stimulating reality and suburban/rural people spending more time online? IDK.
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The question is, where will the relatively wealthy kids who grew up in these places pay to have their own houses built? In even farther-out suburbs, or in vibrant walkable cities?
If you build it (good public school districts in urban areas) they will come. At least that seems to be the biggest consideration in my circles presently. It's a chicken and egg situation in Rust Belt cities, though. Houses are cheap which is good but the schools aren't great compared to what the suburbs offer. You need higher taxes to emphasize a commitment to education but it pisses off the current residents who like the lower costs compared to the burbs and didn't care about the public education level as much (it's likely that either they're older, don't have kids, or just don't place as much of a priority on higher taxes for education) when they decided to move in. If you raise taxes in the name of education and decent earning households with kids are slow to move in, then you've really shot yourself in the foot as your current residents leave and you're worse off than you were before.
The ugly protruding garages...
Preach! I have never figured out why the closest thing to the street would be a garage rather than the front door for so many newer houses. Tuck that shit on the side or in the back. I'm sure others view aesthetics and flow in certain spaces differently. I also don't like when a staircase is the focal point immediately when you walk into a house with a foyer - it should be guiding you to a welcoming space that you want to spend time in, not so car- or bedroom-centric. I'm all for compress and release but not to a staircase that leads to the bedrooms. Anyway...
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Preach! I have never figured out why the closest thing to the street would be a garage rather than the front door for so many newer houses. Tuck that shit on the side or in the back.
Agree on aesthetics, but it may have something to do with cost and available space. You need a wider lot to have driveway go around a house, and some space to turn. So if we care about density, that's out immediately. And as price premium goes, it may not be that high - but not low enough for developers to eat it for no noticeable benefit in appeal to the median home buyer.
Granted, no garage is even better for density, but that's a whole different story. If we care about the environment, we probably want to minimize carbon-heavy concrete and asphalt, as well as non-permeable surfaces to reduce runoff, too..
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I know there are other things beyond biking, but I'd argue that where I live is very bikeable and somewhat Mustachian, although a lot of that has changed everywhere as far as housing costs go. I live in the Northwest Arkansas area and we have greenway trails and offshoots that can get you all the way from Bella Vista down to Fayetteville and offshoots that can get you to downtown Rogers. I can cross a minor road and ride the greenway from my house to the bars/restaurants in downtown Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, or Fayetteville all via bike specific greenway. This also ignores the hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails that are available most of which are accessible straight from the downtown Bentonville square. Obviously I know it in no way compares to Manhattan, Chicago, etc. But as far as having a downtown feel with nice restaurants, bars, breweries, etc. all bikable and with decent houses available for ~$300k (~$200k just a few years ago) it has a bit of what I feel like you are describing. I also am obsessed with mountain biking and outdoor activities, so in my mind the area is very tough to beat. From my house I can bike to great concerts, TopGolf, multiple breweries and dozens of restaurants/bars all within 7-8 miles via the greenway by bike.
The only thing I wish it had was professional sports. Just have to settle for the Razorbacks and the KC Royals AA team.
It's getting some comparison to becoming the next Austin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-next-austin-how-about-arkansas-seriously/2021/11/30/db820a96-51d5-11ec-83d2-d9dab0e23b7e_story.html
Here's a current interactive greenway/mtb trail map: https://cast.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?appid=fbb7b62389044dc78830bd327ae99a85¢er=-94.1597,36.3596&level=13/map/index.html
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Preach! I have never figured out why the closest thing to the street would be a garage rather than the front door for so many newer houses. Tuck that shit on the side or in the back.
Agree on aesthetics, but it may have something to do with cost and available space. You need a wider lot to have driveway go around a house, and some space to turn. So if we care about density, that's out immediately. And as price premium goes, it may not be that high - but not low enough for developers to eat it for no noticeable benefit in appeal to the median home buyer.
Granted, no garage is even better for density, but that's a whole different story. If we care about the environment, we probably want to minimize carbon-heavy concrete and asphalt, as well as non-permeable surfaces to reduce runoff, too..
True, I'm biased since my grid streets area was built with the paved alley infrastructure where the group dumpsters and garage access lies. My lot is 28' wide with a double garage. The garage is detached and we do not have a pergola, so I'm sure there would be people that view that as not ideal. Having a garage is important to me (a space for tools and yard care storage, mitigation on vandalism in the street, rain, snow, ice, blistering sun, other vehicles running into parked cars, etc.), though and any residential property I would consider to live at would need to have one and ideally not be the front focal point. Better to have one that juts out on the front facade compared to not having one at all I guess (for those that want one).
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I know there are other things beyond biking, but I'd argue that where I live is very bikeable and somewhat Mustachian, although a lot of that has changed everywhere as far as housing costs go. I live in the Northwest Arkansas area and we have greenway trails and offshoots that can get you all the way from Bella Vista down to Fayetteville and offshoots that can get you to downtown Rogers. I can cross a minor road and ride the greenway from my house to the bars/restaurants in downtown Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, or Fayetteville all via bike specific greenway. This also ignores the hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails that are available most of which are accessible straight from the downtown Bentonville square. Obviously I know it in no way compares to Manhattan, Chicago, etc. But as far as having a downtown feel with nice restaurants, bars, breweries, etc. all bikable and with decent houses available for ~$300k (~$200k just a few years ago) it has a bit of what I feel like you are describing. I also am obsessed with mountain biking and outdoor activities, so in my mind the area is very tough to beat. From my house I can bike to great concerts, TopGolf, multiple breweries and dozens of restaurants/bars all within 7-8 miles via the greenway by bike.
The only thing I wish it had was professional sports. Just have to settle for the Razorbacks and the KC Royals AA team.
It's getting some comparison to becoming the next Austin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-next-austin-how-about-arkansas-seriously/2021/11/30/db820a96-51d5-11ec-83d2-d9dab0e23b7e_story.html
Here's a current interactive greenway/mtb trail map: https://cast.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?appid=fbb7b62389044dc78830bd327ae99a85¢er=-94.1597,36.3596&level=13/map/index.html
I haven't spent a whole lot of time in NWA in the past few years, but I'm intrigued by the transformation you're describing. Based on my memory, NWA was the definition of suburban sprawl, strip malls, car dependency, and non-bikeability, with only the old parts of town having any residual charm. The hilly terrain and high humidity made bike commuting seem more likely to take off in any other place.
But if what you're describing is the new reality, that's interesting because it means the U.S. could solve car dependency without nuking its existing infrastructure. Just build trails/paths between the existing sprawl and people will ride them (?). It remains to be seen if urban density will increase, because there's still a LOT of empty space in the region.
Of course mountain biking is a sport, not really a form of transportation, so that may be an aside to this conversation about urban transportation. But of course the same people who mountain bike and are attracted to the trails in NWA are probably also willing to pedal 10 miles of hills per day on their commuter bike. It's not exactly Amsterdam but it's another way of achieving the same thing.
Electric bikes could then make such long, hilly trails accessible to the less-fit masses.
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True, I'm biased since my grid streets area was built with the paved alley infrastructure where the group dumpsters and garage access lies. My lot is 28' wide with a double garage. The garage is detached and we do not have a pergola, so I'm sure there would be people that view that as not ideal. Having a garage is important to me (a space for tools and yard care storage, mitigation on vandalism in the street, rain, snow, ice, blistering sun, other vehicles running into parked cars, etc.), though and any residential property I would consider to live at would need to have one and ideally not be the front focal point. Better to have one that juts out on the front facade compared to not having one at all I guess (for those that want one).
I've seen setups like that. I like the idea of a detached garage, although I never lived with one.
There are newer neighborhoods around here that are built in a similar way. There may be a street in front, or a lawn and a walking path, and a garage faces the other way. They are mostly townhouses, and garages are mostly not detached (although some are!).
I really like the setup with a walking path in front. Looks very cute, and you can let children play with friends with no worry about cars. Not much of excess concrete or asphalt, either.
Townhouses with roads in front and in the back look like they sit in a sea of concrete or asphalt. Especially areas where backs of townhouses face each other, they are just terribly depressing.
I think I saw just one older neighborhood with detached houses set up like that, in Frederick MD. That one looked really nice.
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I know there are other things beyond biking, but I'd argue that where I live is very bikeable and somewhat Mustachian, although a lot of that has changed everywhere as far as housing costs go. I live in the Northwest Arkansas area and we have greenway trails and offshoots that can get you all the way from Bella Vista down to Fayetteville and offshoots that can get you to downtown Rogers. I can cross a minor road and ride the greenway from my house to the bars/restaurants in downtown Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, or Fayetteville all via bike specific greenway. This also ignores the hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails that are available most of which are accessible straight from the downtown Bentonville square. Obviously I know it in no way compares to Manhattan, Chicago, etc. But as far as having a downtown feel with nice restaurants, bars, breweries, etc. all bikable and with decent houses available for ~$300k (~$200k just a few years ago) it has a bit of what I feel like you are describing. I also am obsessed with mountain biking and outdoor activities, so in my mind the area is very tough to beat. From my house I can bike to great concerts, TopGolf, multiple breweries and dozens of restaurants/bars all within 7-8 miles via the greenway by bike.
The only thing I wish it had was professional sports. Just have to settle for the Razorbacks and the KC Royals AA team.
It's getting some comparison to becoming the next Austin.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-next-austin-how-about-arkansas-seriously/2021/11/30/db820a96-51d5-11ec-83d2-d9dab0e23b7e_story.html
Here's a current interactive greenway/mtb trail map: https://cast.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?appid=fbb7b62389044dc78830bd327ae99a85¢er=-94.1597,36.3596&level=13/map/index.html
I haven't spent a whole lot of time in NWA in the past few years, but I'm intrigued by the transformation you're describing. Based on my memory, NWA was the definition of suburban sprawl, strip malls, car dependency, and non-bikeability, with only the old parts of town having any residual charm. The hilly terrain and high humidity made bike commuting seem more likely to take off in any other place.
But if what you're describing is the new reality, that's interesting because it means the U.S. could solve car dependency without nuking its existing infrastructure. Just build trails/paths between the existing sprawl and people will ride them (?). It remains to be seen if urban density will increase, because there's still a LOT of empty space in the region.
Of course mountain biking is a sport, not really a form of transportation, so that may be an aside to this conversation about urban transportation. But of course the same people who mountain bike and are attracted to the trails in NWA are probably also willing to pedal 10 miles of hills per day on their commuter bike. It's not exactly Amsterdam but it's another way of achieving the same thing.
Electric bikes could then make such long, hilly trails accessible to the less-fit masses.
I think all your points are valid, but I don't think it's as hilly as you're describing inside the corridor of I-79. When you get out further east (near Beaver) or south of Fayetteville it tends to get much more hilly though. I've ridden the greenway from Bentonville to Fayetteville and back and according to Trailforks, which gives the most generous ascent and descent it had it at about 2k ft of climb on ~55 miles of riding. Now they can pack some elevation into the MTB trails though, especially up in Bella Vista :) I think it's grown into its sprawl a bit more over the years making riding for an activity and as a form of transportation more reasonable. I also think the greenway has expanded a ton in the past ~6 years, which created easily accessible bike routes to each of the downtowns. I also think more businesses have been purposeful to open near the greenway. It used to be if you jumped on the greenway you could find restaurants in downtown Bentonville or downtown Springdale. Now you can find several along th way, breweries are purposefully opening up right off the greenway, etc. Obviously if you end up miles east or miles west of the highway corridor it's still not very bikeable, but if you buy within a couple miles of the highway, you are almost certainly a quick ride from the greenway and it can take you most places you want to go in NWA. I feel like I live out of the fray in Rogers and I could ride my bike from my house to all the Walmart buildings in about 6-8 miles. Greenway ~90% of the time.
To your point I think the mountainbiking has created a community of like minded bikers of all kinds. Downtown Bentonville on weekends is flooded with bikes and on Sunday's they even make the streets around downtown Bentonville primarily pedestrian and bike roads and cars are expected to yield. They call it the slow street program.
Obviously it's not ever going to be a Seattle or NYC, Chicago, but if people are discussing Mustachian places to live (from an affordability perspective) that are very easily commutable via bike that have some of the more urban things people tend to look for, it's just one I've grown to really enjoy over the years.
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At a minimum, you're going to have to change the zoning (as @seattlecyclone notes), but good luck trying to get transit or businesses back into these decaying cul-de-sacs. I think it's much more likely that as their infrastructure decays and they head toward insolvency, these suburbs will cut services back until the state bails them out by assuming more responsibility for previously-local infrastructure.
I'd like to believe that these areas would get a smattering of hair salons, convenience stores, coffee shops, and other small businesses in converted garages if that were allowed. Perhaps as the business grew more popular they'd build a real storefront in the front yard. People in the working-class neighborhoods of a century ago ran publicly-facing businesses out of their homes; I see little reason the same couldn't be true today. Transit is a much tougher one just because of the way the streets are laid out. See the image below for the difference in the amount of area you can cover in a short walk in a grid-system neighborhood vs. a cul-de-sac neighborhood (maps to the same scale). The street design makes fewer people in walking distance of whatever bus stops you might want to install, which depresses ridership.
(https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/02/Picture-13.png)
I bet there are more businesses in those neighborhoods than you think. I know that in my old neighborhood, there were loads of people who sold baked goods, or did sewing and sold on Etsy and locally, people who fixed cars, people who did taxes, people who cut hair in their basement… There’s a whole underground cash economy in older neighborhoods.
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Does having kids influence your preferences for suburban vs urban living? I'm not a big city fan either way, I just don't like people that much. However, I would even more prefer to live in a suburb if I had kids. I would want them to be able to go play in the backyard or ride their bike in the driveway multiple times a day whenever they felt like it as opposed to having to formally go to a park with them.
The first Youtube link in my original post is directly about this topic!
I initially wrote a much longer response but it seems silly for me try to speak about this when I obviously have no experience with kids, so I'll let him do the talking - highly recommend that video on why cities are great places to raise kids (with some caveats re: North America vs EU).
On the other hand, I do have experience being a kid growing up in suburbia, and the inability to get anywhere I wanted to go without someone to drive me was a severe negative that is hard to over-state. The same things that make it possible to live car-free in dense urban areas also make it way more fun and interesting to be a person who's too young to drive.
I watched the video. That makes sense. I thought we were only talking about US cities. I haven't been to one yet that I would let a less than 15 yr old wander around in by themselves.
Interesting conversation here. I’m a parent in a pretty urban part of the SF Bay Area. There are many miserable things about being a parent here, but I think that cities are much better from a kid’s perspective than anything in suburbia. The schools don’t provide bus service for anything beyond elementary, so many 6th graders (11 yrs old) get themselves to and from school walking and using transit. By the time these kids hit high school, they can definitely navigate the city and adjacent cities alone. Both as a parent and as a child, the level of freedom this provides is immense.
Hum of the City described this in a blog post a few years ago: https://humofthecity.com/2019/12/16/christmas-tree-by-bicycle-year-nine/
“But there are, it turns out, some unique advantages to having an older kid who’s competent with public transportation and has given up riding a bicycle solo. The main one is that he’s capable of picking up his sister when we’re busy, and that is something that he could not do on a bicycle. That’s something that he started doing occasionally at 12 and it became a regular expectation at age 13. I only really thought about this recently when another parent—outside the city—mentioned that when their oldest reached 16 they’d finally be able to ferry around their siblings…
I realized that a kid who can confidently ride transit is far better, and so that’s what I say now: my oldest started getting his sister places a full four years earlier than any kid the same age who drives, and public transportation is one of the world’s safest ways to travel.”
This translates to travel as well. An acquaintance of mine brought her 12 yr old twins with her on a business trip to Washington DC a few years ago. She gave them some money and a phone and told them to go check out the city while she worked all day. They went to museums and did all the tourist stuff and had a blast while she worked. They were able to do this because navigating a city alone wasn’t a foreign concept to them. Everyone won.
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Interesting! I had to ride a city bus (chartered) when I was in high school. I have used buses on several trips (NYC, DC, Chicago) without issue, but know many people who would NEVER ride a public bus.
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The customers have to get to the businesses somehow. A low density of nearby housing means there aren't many businesses that can survive on pedestrian traffic alone. You therefore might need a parking lot. The bigger the parking lot, the farther away the houses are, and the less foot traffic you're going to have to the businesses. Similarly, the residents need to get around the area. If you have a dense enough neighborhood a person might be able to accomplish most day-to-day tasks within a 15-minute walk of their home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city). In such areas a car (and parking space to store it) becomes an expensive luxury. Below that level of density and a car becomes more of a prosthetic: an appliance that a person absolutely needs in order gain a baseline level of function. Low density requires cars, and cars thwart efforts to increase density. It's a chicken and egg sort of thing.
Retrofitting the suburbs into true walkability requires more than just the occasional corporate developer plopping a giant modern shopping mall/apartment complex alongside an existing suburban stroad. You've seen this very well. More bottom-up changes will be required. Let people build denser dwellings. Everywhere. People sharing walls with their neighbors is not a nuisance that needs to be regulated into small areas of your city like you'd do with a toxic chemical plant. So much of existing suburbia has essentially no business activity within walking distance. Let people put small businesses near where the people are. Want to put a hair salon or coffee shop or convenience store on any old street corner? Go nuts! Don't require parking lots for these; a good portion of the clientele should be able to walk there, and for those who can't the existing street parking in the neighborhood will often be sufficient. Over time, cool neighborhood businesses will attract more neighborhood residents, which will attract more businesses, and a virtuous circle of density will ensue.
I used to live in Reston, VA. A town planned around the concept that residents, businesses, and retail are all dependent upon one another and meant to balance the equation. Even the network of walking trails was designed so residents could get from one "cluster" to another "cluster" or retail shopping without having to drive or cross a major street. I really liked the idea of it, and up until about 10 years ago, I think most residents there supported the mission and tried to live/work/shop in the same area. It all works out great until someone wants a cheap TV. Then we have to drive to the big box store. Then the big box store moved into the neighborhood, requiring additional parking and lots of surface parking lots. Those don't make for fun nature walks.
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Interesting! I had to ride a city bus (chartered) when I was in high school. I have used buses on several trips (NYC, DC, Chicago) without issue, but know many people who would NEVER ride a public bus.
I think the stigma against buses, while ridiculous, is an incredibly important point in favor of trains/subways for urban transit. Lots of middle class or wealthy people will not ride buses, period. This attitude could be changed eventually, over generations. But there’s something ~premium~ about trains that makes taking transit mainstream. When I lived in New York, I never took a bus, and neither did most people I knew. The distinction is completely arbitrary and cultural, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Cities really just have to invest in rail.
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I think the stigma against buses, while ridiculous, is an incredibly important point in favor of trains/subways for urban transit. Lots of middle class or wealthy people will not ride buses, period. This attitude could be changed eventually, over generations. But there’s something ~premium~ about trains that makes taking transit mainstream. When I lived in New York, I never took a bus, and neither did most people I knew. The distinction is completely arbitrary and cultural, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Cities really just have to invest in rail.
I'm not sure about how universal it is. Here in outer DC suburbs, commuter buses are quite popular among professionals working in the city and living in the suburbs. I have a bit of an insider view on stats on that. Also, employer-provided buses in Silicon Valley are quite popular (reportedly, no first-hand knowledge). Local buses are underused - but they are also REALLY bad here. Low coverage, infrequent, road layout not conducive to transit at all. Plus, they stop running so early that people working service jobs take buses to work, and uber/lyft from work.
Buses are a much, much better bang for a buck compared to rail. On top of it, US often really sucks at urban rail. Again, here in and near DC, the metro saga is so embarrassing, I don't know how to even describe it.
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I think the stigma against buses, while ridiculous, is an incredibly important point in favor of trains/subways for urban transit. Lots of middle class or wealthy people will not ride buses, period. This attitude could be changed eventually, over generations. But there’s something ~premium~ about trains that makes taking transit mainstream. When I lived in New York, I never took a bus, and neither did most people I knew. The distinction is completely arbitrary and cultural, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Cities really just have to invest in rail.
I'm not sure about how universal it is. Here in outer DC suburbs, commuter buses are quite popular among professionals working in the city and living in the suburbs. I have a bit of an insider view on stats on that. Also, employer-provided buses in Silicon Valley are quite popular (reportedly, no first-hand knowledge). Local buses are underused - but they are also REALLY bad here. Low coverage, infrequent, road layout not conducive to transit at all. Plus, they stop running so early that people working service jobs take buses to work, and uber/lyft from work.
Buses are a much, much better bang for a buck compared to rail. On top of it, US often really sucks at urban rail. Again, here in and near DC, the metro saga is so embarrassing, I don't know how to even describe it.
When I've lived places were I could take buses, I have. But I like using rail systems significantly more than buses, though I'm not sure exactly why I have the preference. I think it's some combination of:
1) Train stations usually have a higher density of people which feels safer and livelier.
2) Trains are sometimes (often?) more comfortable than buses (counterpoint: BART).
3) Trains usually have better support infrastructure (updated schedule and route info, user apps, bathrooms at stations, etc).
4) Riding rail is more impersonal. All automated so I don't have to speak/make eye contact with anyone. This might sound like a contradiction with #1, but it's not. Being able to lose yourself in a crowd is more comfortable for me than standing a a bus stop with two other people.
5) The infrastructure of trains creates a feeling that the city values me and is committed to continuing to support my transportation needs in a stable and predicable manner (as opposed to a bus route which could be changed or canceled instantly).
#1 is more related to ridership than mode, so if you had a really popular bus system this might not be an issue. I'm sure nice bus systems have already addressed #3 and #4, but I haven't been a regular bus commuter for nearly twenty years. When I've tried to use buses in cities I've traveled to, it is often harder to figure out than the rail system. #5 seems like the hardest one to overcome.
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Also, lots of car-dependent cities have minimal bus systems that offer poor service, infrequent routes, slow routes, long transfer times, etc. Whatever the minimum was to get federal funding. Poor service is how bus systems became known as transportation for the poor.
What's weird to me is that to build an urban light-rail system, a city has to spend billions on environmental impact studies. Seems like there should be an exemption for things we know will improve the environment and will primarily operate in developed areas anyway. How is it easier to get a parking lot approved than a mass transit system?
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There is a lot of truth to these 5 points. Trains are usually nicer, and they move more people faster.
It's virtually impossible to make a train-based network dense enough for a city to rely on it alone. In every city with well-functioning transit system that I know of, metro is complemented by buses. It may not even have much rail at all, in fact.
It also becomes an issue of equity. It is usually more expensive to live near a metro station, but people who can't afford it need public transit, too.
When I lived in dense cities (outside the US), I relied primarily on buses. I knew bus routes in parts of the city where I lived and worked, and had to rely on strangers' help to figure out which bus I needed in other parts. When I visit a city, I tend to use metro or trams if it is at all possible, simply because the route network is smaller and easier to figure out (part of the reason #3 above, I think). Plus, since it's only a short visit, it's not that much more expensive to live near metro.
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Also, lots of car-dependent cities have minimal bus systems that offer poor service, infrequent routes, slow routes, long transfer times, etc. Whatever the minimum was to get federal funding. Poor service is how bus systems became known as transportation for the poor.
This is 100% spot on.
In my county, the most used local route is also, objectively, the worst. 1 hour intervals between buses - meaning that if you miss a bus, you are set back a whole hour! Long, winding route that takes forever to complete.
Why is it most used? Because it serves two poorest neighborhoods. Many immigrants who (I suspect) can't get a drivers license. They have no choice, so the use it.
Other local routes are not *good*, bit are better. They serve more affluent neighborhoods, where few people have any incentive to bother with a bus. I rode mine out of principle once in a while until Covid - it took me 1.5 hours to get to work, while driving took 10 minutes. yes, you read it right. No, I couldn't walk or bike, because physical barriers.
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Did you know that there used to be trolley lines that ran *between* cities? They died out when the government courted the auto companies and subsidized highway building.
Don’t count out buses - in most areas they aren’t any less comfortable than commuter trains or subways, and they are generally a lot more accessible than those trains or subways. (In NYC lots of subway stations are incredibly inaccessible to disabled people.) It’s also now really easy to figure out what bus to take because it’s all online. You can see exactly where the bus is in real time, too.
There are a lot of regional bus companies that go between cities. Many of these coordinate with Amtrak, and are actually very pleasant to travel on.
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Did you know that there used to be trolley lines that ran *between* cities? They died out when the government courted the auto companies and subsidized highway building.
Indeed. I would add that if a property developer wanted to make a new suburb the customers would need a way to get there (or they wouldn't buy the homes). So the property developer would arrange for the construction of the streetcar line (with private funds) to their new "streetcar suburb." Then the streetcar would operate as a private for-profit enterprise (often as a PUC, often as the same PUC as the electric company). This means that we went from private capital building streetcar lines that paid taxes (both income and property) to taxpayer subsidized roads that pay neither.
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And some of the older amusement parks (I know Kennywood in Pittsburgh, for one) were built by the trolley companies to get people to take the trolley to the end of the line.