This is going to be a polemical comment, but I feel compelled to share it:
It's my opinion that a great deal of the blame (if not the outright majority) for this state of affairs can be levied against suburban culture (and, by extension, car culture).
The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white. They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.) Things like childcare are purchasable services, not kindnesses that you or your neighbor do for each other when the other's in a pinch. When this is your bubble (or, for the rest of us, the dominant cultural metaphor for responsible parenting), it's hard not to see the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger.
Great, just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there. Then we can all live in four story walkups and ride our bicycles and eat fresh baguettes...without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.
I'm being genuinely serious here. I used to love the concept of relatively high density living. For years I walked or rode my bicycle everywhere in cities. But I got sick of the fights and the filth, got too many concussions, and now I'm out here in the country side where I "see the world as a foreign and scary place".
Make it nicer and we'll come back. If that doesn't happen, don't complain when we make rational decisions for ourselves and our families.
The perception of urban blight is, to the best of my understanding, a mostly separate cultural phenomenon. It doesn't have to be the case for every city in the US to be a shining pillar of civic excellence (many of them aren't!) for it to be the case that suburban living drives alienation that feeds into statistically irrational fears of strangers.
In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.
(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)
Similarly, I've lived in and around Boston my entire adult life (I'm 34) and I don't think I've ever seen needles on the street. I've seen what was probably human waste two or three times. It seems like San Francisco and Portland in particular are pretty bad, from talking to folks who live there and from visiting both. But most urban areas I've been to in the United States are fine.
(Now, are American cities kind of dirty? Yeah. There's a ton of people who travel through every day. But Americans, as a rule, seem to not like paying that much for other folks. Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of urban cleaning that'd be necessary.)
As a Bostonian myself, I'm getting used to the idea that we're the exception, rather than the rule. I typically _do_ see these things when I travel within the country. But I'm increasingly seeing it as a "Boston success" rather than a "San Francisco problem" or "Austin problem" or "Seattle problem", because it seems more like a default state, given the current way of things.
That said, I'm not sure what to attribute that to. It could be the broad availability of drug rehab and housing services. It could be that the climate is inhospitable to living on the street for the majority of the year. For all I know, it could be an aftershock of the city's love affair with redlining, effectively putting me away from where I would see it.
It's just a mix of climate and policy. In Milwaukee you can see some serious blight but they don't even allow overnight parking on the streets without a permit, let alone overnight pooping.
Personally can't recall ever seeing needles or human feces in or around Austin. Some areas/alleyways around 4th-7th can get pretty urine-y on the weekends.
Generally speaking, one is more likely to run into horse manure around Austin.
Was this down voted because the horse manure comment?
To clarify, I meant that quite literally. Horses are considered a legal vehicle. It is not uncommon to see people riding horses (small groups, solo, & APD mounted patrol) along the shoulder of a road or along the creek and river trails in central/south/southeast/east Austin, especially on the weekends. Probably other places too, but those are the areas I am familiar with.
It is certainly more common to see horse manure in the city than it is to see the human feces or needles that was alluded to in the comment I replied too. At least, in my personal experience spanning decades.
It is sort of shocking that an objectively rich city like San Francisco has considerably worse homelessness problem than, say, Uzhhorod in Ukraine. (With average income perhaps 10 per cent of SF one, if not less.)
It's mostly because the political culture of SF is trying to solve a mental health issue in compromising way, because the real solution set is not a local level thing, but a state and federal level thing. It's same with the current DA, trying to activist create an alternative to arrest vs. using social workers, while such a solution needs more than the power of the DA's office to properly implement. So you get half-assed solutions that don't actually solve anything much.
Also pure corruption. You'll notice there are a bunch of regions where the homeless roam, and bunch where they do not, and there are very good reasons as to why that is the case.
> the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter
I doubt it. Housing is one of those problems that is quite easy to solve and the fact that poorer countries can do it while the US can't must be because of nefarious. The same shit is said about developing countries having a lower COVID death rate than the US, "they must be hiding a lot of bodies." In fact, it is quite hard to hide a lot of bodies.
The fact is the US does poorly on a lot of metrics and we have the capability not to.
You can also fairly easily survive winter in the street in Málaga or Madrid, but those cities haven't turned to an Europe-wide haven of homeless people.
If you're trying to call me a liar, it's better to not be oblique.
I've lived in three neighborhoods for my entire life: Bloomingdale (now called "Manhattan Valley"), South Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The only one that I regularly saw needles in was South Harlem, and that was only by one apartment where we had a guy dealing on the corner. That was a pretty unpleasant situation. I only saw needles once or twice in Bloomingdale, and I've yet to see them anywhere in my current parts of Brooklyn.
As for the poop: NYC has a big dog poop problem, which is what that article is about. I don't think anybody has ever contested that.
Where on earth did you get liar? You just have a very different context from many of us. I worked three jobs for 30 years so my kids could live a sheltered life.
That was how I read "it's good to be you." I apologize for the misinterpretation.
I've said this in other threads: there is crime in NYC. It's a big city with a lot of people in it, and I am not pretending that it is a utopia. But it just isn't an overriding (or even pressing) feature of life here.
It is if you’re paying rent for a storefront and junkies are blocking the door so customers can’t get in, the cops won’t do anything, and “nonviolent misdemeanors” aren’t prosecuted.
Then it’s an overriding and pressing feature of your life.
Yes: if you're actually victimized, then it becomes an overriding and pressing feature of your life. But you're sidestepping the claim: it's just not that common here.
I've never seen drug addicts block a storefront here. The closest thing I've seen to that is someone (and I really do mean one individual) try to panhandle in a restaurant. They were kicked out.
Murder and rape are down a few percent each. Almost everything else is skyrocketing. Robbery is up 15.8%. Felonious assault is up 13.8%. Grand larceny is up 18.6%. Grand larceny auto at 14.2%.
Crime overall is up 11.2% in one year. That’s affecting a lot of people other than you. I find your dismissal of so many people’s misery to be callous at best.
Of course, it's useful to keep in mind here that overall crime rates are still around only half what they were in the 70s-90s. Combine that with the obvious aftereffects of a lasting pandemic and lockdown (and pandemic-related stimulus evaporating while outbreaks continue) and it doesn't seem very prudent to adopt a sky-is-falling attitude.
I think you misread your own link. Crime in October 2021 was 11.2% higher than October 2020, but YTD crime (the thing people usually call "crime overall") is only up 1.3%. It's the next sentence in the same graf.
I have not been callous, in any ordinary sense of the word. When people are affected by crime (and indeed, they are in this city), I feel bad for them. What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.
(If you want real callousness, read about the people who died in last year's flooding[1]. NYC has a flood control system that should have lessened the damage, but it didn't function because the city hasn't done regular street cleanings for the past two years. Why haven't they done street cleanings? Because car owners complained about having to move their cars during the pandemic.)
> What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.
I assume that is a general statement and not based on something I said, because of course I made no such accusations.
I am however glad that you give your own two eyes credibility for reporting. Each of the articles I posted was a product of someone else’s two eyes and included pictures of what would be considered an alarming situation if one lived in those neighborhoods. Many of them are from a borough called “The Bronx”, which is north of you. It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.
As far as the statistics I gave you, year over a year is obviously a much better sample then part of the year. It’s smooths out the curves. I could easily have chosen some statistics from the summer of 2020 that would make it look much worse. I did not.
Not sure why you threw in the drainage situation but I like that you did. Offhand the only city I know of that plans properly for this is Phoenix, Arizona. From what I can tell no other major city in the country comes even close to that kind of preparation.
> It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.
I went to high school in the Bronx, and spent most of my adolescence walking around it (including the "scary" part, which is the South Bronx). It's not a hellhole either, "rich multicultural" dogwhistling aside.
Edit: This is going to be my last comment. I don't think you live here, which makes me think that the back-and-forth of "here's what it's like" versus "here's an eye-popping news story about a crime" isn't accomplishing much.
Duly upvoted because I love a good debate. Thanks for engaging!
Where I live is a little hard to pin down because I own residences on multiple continents. I say Seattle because that’s where my farm is and I spend most of my time there.
New York City was the greatest city in the world until recently, but I’m equally interested in what’s going on in Shanghai, Beijing, and other places. But in my view it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about a place even if you haven’t lived there for a while. Or ever. I listen to lots of wonderful commentary about the USA from people in the United Kingdom, for example.
Then by your logic you are doing the same to me. Quoting easily verifiable crime statistics (along with a link to said statistics) and photographic evidence of obvious degradation was simply an alternate viewpoint from my perspective.
Both “stories”, as you put it, are true. In fact, I congratulated the person for building a sheltered world. I did the same for my wife and children. Nothing wrong with keeping your family out of the muck.
Could you pay for some "security staff" to "clean up" the area around your storefront? As long as the clean up process doesn't involve anything more than misdemeanors it sounds like nobody will be prosecuted.
In theory police enforce the law. In practice, police do what democratically elected officials tell them to do, and there will always be more shoplifters and homeless people than business owners. So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.
> So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.
“Will” pay for itself? Spoken like someone who has never had to pay the bills to run a retail establishment.
Depends on where you are. San Francisco absolutely has a real, extremely-visible problem in a number of places. In a "walk from transit to work, you'll see it quite literally every day for years on end" kind of way.
When it rains, a significant amount of the Market Street area (and surrounding blocks) smells like pee for a day.
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Part of the issue with the "perception vs reality" claim in big cities is that people who live near-ish to places with issues like this avoid those places, either consciously (x area is dangerous so don't park there) or subconsciously (none of your friends go there, so you don't know anything there, and have no reason to go randomly). Visitors and new arrivals are pretty often more likely to encounter it at a more accurate rate.
Perhaps greed is a factor in non-enforcement, but I suspect in LA it's more of a "overly humanitarian" subculture. See Echo Park protests. bodies were turning up in that park, and it was unusable for local residents due to a massive encampment and rampant drug use. When the police showed up to clear it, they met actual protestors from outside the neighborhood who thought it was inhumane to force the campers to move on.
I lived in Studio City for a bit. We had a well-known vagrant who lived under a local bridge who regularly accosted women, including assault, groping, etc. The nice walking paths along the LA river, and the immediate neighborhood around them were completely unsafe even during daylight hours for my wife and daughters to walk along. What could be done?
I lived in mount washington for a bit. There, the citizens would quietly organize, bring lots of shovels, and go "clean up" even the smallest encampments. I suspect if that word got out, they'd meet protestors, or even police.
I'm all for helping those who need and want it.
The trouble is, there's a significant enough population that doesn't want help, and wants to camp and live among drug use wherever they choose. This is the only case where "Not in my backyard" makes absolute sense. Police can and should protect the safety of neighborhoods and parks which are funded and occupied by tax payers.
Go to venice. It looks like a third world country. Last time I went to the beach, none of the shops were open and obviously-mentally-ill people were sitting in their own filth on residential and commercial doorsteps. One obviously intoxicated person was holding a can of gasoline on the sidewalk, and swaying between cars he didn't own. What good can come of this? The rights of the people in that area need to be balanced against each other through the use of local laws and law enforcement. We've gone way too far past "balanced" towards an ideologically-forced tolerance of vagrancy.
It is not the job of the average citizen to come up with solutions, it is normal and fine for citizens to collectively demand change from their government and to weigh the outcomes during the next election cycle. My own lack of ingenious ideas for it does not mean I need to be silent and tolerate the solution.
After regularly getting catcalled directly outside my door and being followed at night, I said “fuck this” and moved to a small walkable town not far outside the city. It’s much easier to not treat strangers as predators here, because they generally don’t act like predators. I still enjoy a day in the city, but at home I can take nighttime walks with no worries. I do feel a little bad that I couldn’t stick it out like other people can.
Today, I walked a couple blocks west of where I work to grab a slice of pizza and while I ate, a dude just hauled forth his member and urinated in the gutter, not 15 feet away from me. I felt bad for the tourists and their kids, but only because the pizza was overpriced and tasted like Digiorno.
Usually I find defecation is easiest - not for me, but for the unfortunate souls without access to privacy - at the far end of a subway platform, away from the glare of publicity.
I don’t feel it’s fair to criticize someone explaining why they live the way they do when you where the first to criticize said group:
>>The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
The presence of this comment purposely invites controversy.
If these people are supposed to behave differently (from a cultural standpoint), there are issues that need to be resolved first. These “two different topics” are heavily intertwined.
Also, presumably the issue of needles and human waste can be resolved with further prosocial investments in harm reduction facilities for drug users and housing for the homeless. These problems aren't intractable.
The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.
To those unsympathetic to addiction being a medical condition, these facilities are just seen as legalization which goes against everything they've been fed. This isn't even a NIMBY thing as they don't just not want it in their area, they don't want them to exist at all.
Showing how they have worked in Europe, then they will just write it off as socialist policies run amok.
giving people needles and drugs is called harm reduction for a reason - it's to reduce the risk of dirty needles and street drugs, these policies don't solve drug addiction, they just keep drug addicts safe(r). Solving drug addiction is actually a tremendously hard problem but it starts with helping rather than punishing addicts. Portugal is a good example of doing this right: drugs are broadly decriminalised and the government provides help to addicts. Here's an article on drug policies across Europe (and some other countries): https://www.foundationswellness.net/drug-abuse/do-other-coun...
I’m all for providing help to addicts, but giving them the drugs doesn’t seem to help. While I offer no solutions, I don’t think this is working and believe there is a better way. Perhaps rehab centers or synthesized equivalents that decrease potency over time.
> make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places
Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted
This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.
Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.
> fights and the filth, got too many concussions
Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.
> This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem.
It's a numbers and climate problem. If you're homeless in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, or New York in the winter, you die. If you come to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, you survive
Have you ever checked actual crime rates? Cause this does not passes smell test. You are way more likely to be robbed or attacked in Prague or Warsaw then in Vienna or Munich or whatever. And the cops will be harder to deal with in Eastern Europe.
Eastern European cities are safer then they used to be in the nineties, sure. They are safe enough to have kids walk around. They are not safer then wester cities which are even more safer in general.
Big Eastern cities have robberies too. And fights too. They are not some kind of hellholes, most are safe enough. But they are not safer then western cities.
Small Eastern cities do have criminality too, for that matter. Both organized and low level one. As I said, it is all improving in general, but claim that they are oh so safer is not true.
Eastern cities can also be safer for foreigners in general. Cities like Prague depend on being tourist hotspots. If they get a reputation for being dangerous, they'll lose a lot of rich people a lot of money. Serious crime against foreigners may be dealt with harshly enough that criminals learn to stick to the locals and limit to mild scams on the tourists. After all, the tourists bring the money that they can then steal from a local at leisure.
>> Cities like Prague depend on being tourist hotspots.
No, they don't. Prague is the capitol of Czech republic, there is a lot of business there, and tourists are just nuisance. Same for big Polish cities like Warsaw or Cracow.
Crimes against foreigners are not treated any different than crimes against locals, there's simply not much crime to begin with.
The 'Paris experience' famously does not scale to the rest of Western Europe. Getting mugged/fleeced by someone on day 1 in Paris is a ubiquitous experience that I have never heard be replicated anywhere else.
> Eastern European cities are safer then they used to be in the nineties, sure. They are safe enough to have kids walk around.
At age 9 and 10, I was travelling every day alone in a city bus to school through a city in Poland in early nineties. Nothing ever happened to me. I don't think there was particularly that much violent crime even then. Car thefts, OTOH, were pretty common until the mid 2000s when the police and state got the hang of it.
It's common to see arguments of this form, which are essentially "the current state of the affairs is simply the result of what people prefer: they prefer to drive everywhere, live in big houses with big backyards in sprawling suburbs, etc." In other words, just explaining (and excusing!) the state of affairs as being "what the market wants." I do think there is some truth in these arguments. Of course there will always be some people who prefer that and some people who prefer living in more dense communities/cities. But what's missing from this is discussion about how non-market forces affect the state of affairs? What about city planning, zoning, even direct subsidies like paying for freeways and streets?
100% I am in the suburbs because the two cities we love (Portland and San Francisco) have inconvenient busing and/or lottery systems for their public schools. And we would prefer to use public schools over private.
That being said we picked a suburb that is actually quite walkable for our daily needs due a good public trail system and being adjacent to a large community college campus.
With low birth rates, certainly a lot of people may have large backyard suburbia as the ideal but do not want to deal with single family homes for their small family of 2 or 3. A condo or townhome with green space can be a life with much fewer hassles.
Detached homes, especially the lovely ones with mature trees and gardens, require a lot of work. Things like snow removal, leaf pickup, scrubbing mildew off the siding, tree trimming, concrete repair, roofs, hvac maintenance, cleaning and servicing multiple vehicles, and the list goes on. And of course older homes are booby trapped wrecks of lead, asbestos, cloth-insulated wiring, corroded pipe, and shoddy insulation. Naturally, in many desirable locations old is the only affordable type, too.
There's also the observation that indulging everyone's preference doesn't necessarily lead to a global optimum. A straightforward analogy is traffic, or crowd control - if you let everyone follow what they perceive to be the optimum route, the flow becomes dysfunctional as everyone tries to occupy the same space, and occasionally people even get squished.
Subsidies are a big one. All the core aspects of American suburbs have been subsidized for 70 years: oil, autos, highways, single family homes, freight (via highways), service lines. People talk about a free market but there was a great deal of post-war central planning which decided this was the community of the future (Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses come to mind but it began as early as Roosevelt). Part of this was the dual-use aspect of oil and auto industries and highways for the military.
strongtowns.org has ongoing research that shows most suburban communities are not self-sustaining as a tax base and rely on nearby cities and outside investment to support their infrastructure.
That's a good point. I think there's also the question of us this really the result of what people prefer? Maybe there are other inefficiencies that are not non-market forces that caused this.
Where did you live? Right now I'm in the middle of Chicago with my elementary aged children sleeping peacefully. I don't live in the wealthiest neighborhood. I don't live in the poorest. It's pretty diverse (by the standards of Chicago).
I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).
Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.
Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?
I moved to Tokyo a few years back, right before the pandemic. Seeing comments like this makes me feel very lucky that I didn't instead choose a large US city.
I wonder if some of the people commenting here have ever been to a city like Tokyo. It is a great example of what is actually possible when it comes to cleanliness and safety in a massive urban environment.
I think their point was that safe cities are possible, not that we should all move to Japan. Someone who has only experienced a dangerous city or a car centric city, the possibilities might not be obvious to them so there is a very defeatist attitude, as if this is just the way cities are.
I remember cruising through the streets of Tokyo in the middle of the night, still worried that I might get jumped by a meth hear even though it was extremely unlikely. It's a pre-conception that is hard to let go of.
If Pewdiepie, a man worth millions of dollars can do it after four years of Byzantine bureaucracy can do it, anyone can! Seriously though, he documented just how difficult the process is on his YouTube channel. Moving to Japan is insanely difficult.
Assuming you get a job, it's actually not difficult. If you work in tech, you can probably even get a visa that gets you PR in 3 years. I moved mostly on a whim directly prior to the pandemic, and haven't run into any major stumbling blocks.
The language barrier is the biggest issue. Assuming you live in a large city (and really, you should), the town halls have translators. You may need to wait for them to be available, and the translations may not be amazing, but they'll help you solve any tasks you need to do.
The next biggest issues are getting a phone number (you need a residence card first), getting a bank account (you need a residence card and a phone number), and getting a credit card (you need a residence card, a phone number, and will need to deal with them sending your card with your katakana name on the envelope). If you have a job, they'll help you do all of these things.
Getting housing isn't really a problem. At this point there's lots of gaikokujin housing (short-term rentals, month-to-month leases, sharedhouses, etc). It's possible to find it online with no Japanese language skills. Again, if you have a job, they'll help you find housing.
If you're coming in as a student, your school will also help you with all of these things.
Pewdiepie makes money off of making content. Saying "hey, this isn't very hard" isn't entertaining. Don't use him as a real-life example.
I think it's a lot easier for employees than for freelance types. Even the companies hiring language instructors will do most of the paperwork for you.
There are many developed European cities that are totally fine and do not have major cultural barriers. Some of them even speak english as a first language!
Dense living doesn't necessarily have to be a big city.
I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.
This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.
That's really not my experience with the U.S. I'm from a smaller city (250k) and there are constantly people out in my neighborhood. Kids playing, riding bike, people walking, pets, etc... Just a lot of activity!
We have large windows too so it's fun seeing it all.
> But I got sick of the fights [...] got too many concussions
While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?
The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).
First big concussion I got was me walking home at night. I was living right in the centre of town, a few minutes from a grocery store. You know, like how people on HN moralise we should all do.
Three people jumped out of a car, beat me up and left. It was a gang initiation thing - beat up a random civilian and get to the first rank, or something. After that concussion I was a lot more susceptible to other concussions.
Can't make an NYC analogue - do people feel safe there walking at all hours of the night by themselves, even in dark areas? If so great, maybe that's a place I'd live too, like Tokyo or Taipei.
I believe the multiple concussions are related to the danger of bicycling in the city, which he also states he did. The appropriate question, then, is "Do you think the majority of the N people in NYC that commute primarily by bicycle have gotten a concussion while living there?"
Yep, and there is a major difference between a casual ride to pick up a sandwich at 2pm on Sundays compared to the morning hustle jockeying for position in the delivery truck avoidance dystopia--surely gamified somewhere on Steam.
There's a big, but disappearing, middle ground between "urban city center" and "suburban housing development."
Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.
I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.
It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.
That multi-use zoning “middle-ground” town describes what I live in now and it’s lovely. I wish there was more like it so that everyone could live like this.
Or no public schools. What's even the point? The whole k-12 curriculum needs a revamp. Can they at least compress it to k-9 and leave the rest of those years for actual preparation for adulthood?
Oh dear lord no. Have you ever met a 9th-grader? They still have so much to explore about the world and themselves! It would be a tragedy to stop formally educating the public so soon.
Honestly, I feel the same way. My wife and I left a bigger city for similar reasons. Now we life in the country, and it’s inconvenient, but it’s just nicer out here.
I think we need to stop talking about cities and suburbs as if it's a binary decision. There are a ton of options in the middle which are not as loud or dense as cities while also not being as isolating and unwalkable as suburbs. Building more missing middle housing would help solve the problem significantly but no one (at least no one with the power and means to do so) wants to do that.
I'm already paying an order of magnitude more for the same facilities I'd get in states that are less dense than California.
At least out here, things are so screwy that minor details like cost of materials are rounding error.
Will happily pay for atmospheric carbon recapture, which covers the biggest externality.
Also, like most other commenters from the west coast, I'd live in one of the cities if they weren't littered with human waste, and if they had reasonable public schools.
They are referring to sprawl externalities. Strong Towns delves into this (and they have some points, but are also overly pessimistic about suburban and rural costs).
I live in a walkable community on the US east coast that is clean, safe, and downright affordable compared to SF. Every student in town can walk to school, we walk to stores, restaurants, bars, and a train that takes us into the city center.
No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.
Pretty much. For some reason people see the suburbs as some forced development decision when in fact it's pretty much housing consumers choosing what they want.
the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".
I don't buy it based on my own experience living around the world. I lived in Asia for a while where an apartment was the norm and public transit meant you didn't need a car (and most didn't have one).
What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.
Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
I would totally want to live in a single family home with a garden in a city - all the benefits of city living, with space.
But single family homes set in the suburbs, amongst endless other single family homes? It's nowhere near as good. You have to drive everywhere and there's not enough density to support local shops.
I think it's a mistake to assume that because almost everyone would, with enough money, want their own home and land, that they'd also want it in the suburbs. You just need to look at property values to see that isn't the case - houses and apartments in the city are worth more.
I could trade my terraced house in the city for a much larger one in the distant suburbs. But that would mean driving everywhere, living by busy fast roads, not having a huge range of shops nearby, having to commute further into work, not being able to cycle - all things that make it not worth it. Clearly a lot of my neighbours feel the same way.
I think that biggest killer is kids once they are beyond toddler stage. Kids ability to go independently to sports club, visit friend or go to school ads a lot of comfort to both kid and parent. And kids occasional ability to fetch something from local store is a neat addition too.
I live in a suburban single-family home in the US with a yard and garden in a small town just outside a small city. I use my car once a week at most (but normally not at all), usually just to enjoy a day trip into the city. From home we walk or bike to restaurants, groceries, coffee, library, parks, breweries, boutique stores, etc. I think this is the ideal, and if someone gave me all the money in the world I’d honestly be hard pressed to find a place I’d rather live. But even money isn’t an issue, because cost of living is fairly low here.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that outside the cities it’s all highways and endless suburbs.
I was thinking the infrastructure and amenities state of US suburbs, where they're basically stamped down in blocks off a highway. I live in a single family home and drive a car in the UK, but there are tons of amenities within walking distance (and I can walk anywhere), community events and green spaces, etc. I can drive, get a bus or cycle into the nearest city, which my town is clustered near to, so opportunities are aplenty. I know my neighbours, family are nearby, and so on. The vibe I get from American suburbs is that they're much more like isolated house-units and if you want to do anything you have to drive to somewhere totally different.
I dunno. The most expensive are houses near center of city usually. People pay a lot for that. Then second most are apartments near center of city. The houses further away are cheaper. Some people definitely prefers them, but I dont think buying patterns show them being majority.
The houses with no stores around, with no busses around where you and your kids needs driving everywhere are comparatively cheap. Even people living in houses with yards seem to prefer them if they are either walking distance from forest, walking distance from stores/community centers and ideally both.
The most expensive are houses near center of city usually.
The houses in the suburbs of Bay Area peninsula are more expensive than the houses inside SF city limits. Of course there many factors like schools that influence that, but I wouldn't argue your observation is always correct.
And price is due to supply/demand. If the supply of single family homes in the middle of cities was high enough to keep costs down, sure, plenty of families would choose those. But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.
> But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.
Yes, but I dont see majority of people doing that worldwide. And where they do that, they prefer houses in near villages where there are stores and community centers nearby. And those houses have small businesses in them.
The local stores or walkable infrastructure are not exclusive feature of cities. That is something that does not exists only where it is illegal to open local store near the houses.
What do you mean "worldwide"? When I lived in Asia people lived in small concrete boxes with no windows so they could work in big cities and not pay a lot for rent.
With the exception of wealthy countries, I'd argue most people don't have the choice of living in an apartment in the city or a big house in the country.
I don't see anything that would suggest majority of people anywhere prefers to live in houses in locations with no transport other then car and no stores etc nearby.
In wealthy countries, people live in remote houses like that because it is cheaper. Houses in walkable places are way more expensive. You have to be at the level of "shopping and everything is done by somebody else and kids are driven by nanny" rich to get to demographic where it is opposite.
Whoa, we just went from "single family home" to "single family home...in locations with no transport other than car and no stores etc nearby".
I never said people prefer that.
I said people prefer a single family home, a yard and a car. That's not actually achievable in most city centers (unless wealthy) so many people give up location in exchange for a single family home, a yard and car.
Thus, suburbs aren't forced on anyone. Many people chose a single family home, in the suburbs, over an apartment in the city. The cost of that is not being able to walk everywhere, and people are willing to pay that price.
This is what the thread starts with: the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".
You specifically said "I don't buy it" to the above comment that was about car oriented suburbs specifically.
Nowhere you specified you are changing topic from the above (suburbs) to "house anywhere".
>What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.
> Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.
Nope, dream ofmost of the people would be to "buy a single family home, with it's own land within the city without doing taxi driver for your kids".
But since this is completely scifi since houses in city are the most expensive people have to settle either for city apartments or house outside city and becoming taxi driver.
To be clear: I don't see them as a forced development decision. It's clear that they're extremely preferable for many people, in a large part because the economic envelope for suburbs includes massive externalities. Unsustainable road and utility networks are the standard example.
Put another way: consumers are choosing the best option for them, because they don't have to pay the true cost of their living environment. If the economic envelope matched the underlying reality, suburban development would be mostly an economic dead end.
“Make it nicer and we'll come back.” Oh boy, there’s so much wrong in that attitude!
Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.
Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.
Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.
Maybe if the middle class suburban whites hadn't spent seventy years pushing crack into black neighborhoods, systematically breaking up families, demolishing communities to replace them with highways, extracting tax money and spending it on services for suburban middle class neighborhoods, arresting people for feeding the homeless, guarding discarded food so it doesn't get eaten, undermining education in poor neighborhoods, and straight up killing them when they request help from the authorities, some of those problems would not be as bad.
> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.
What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.
But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.
The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.
Where did the meme that this would work originate?
Work backwards from cities that are actually clean & safe. Is Singapore this way because of their "extremely socialist policies"?
Is the goal a clean and safe city at all costs no matter what the cost? Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
The Singapore way is easier, no doubt. But I don't think it's that ludicrous to believe we could have a free AND a socialist society.
There are different attitudes,congestion and interactions for cyclists in different cities. NYC drivers seems particularly antagonistic towards cyclists, I have seen many examples of what seemed like intentional strikes to me by taxis and commercial drivers who are likely to be more time crunched and build up a frustration towards cyclists. But cyclists also seem to be of a more daring rugged stock there too.
Granted, my only personal comparison would be to Buffalo, Albany, Poughkeepsie and San Diego, all which have much less congested city centers.
The only east coast city that matched the "needles and feces" attitudes I have seen was Philadelphia. As soon as you start driving into the city it is impossible to notice how much trash and car debris is in the road. The moment I parked, we saw needles on the ground and as a result I was more likely to notice I imagine. But, it was truly a filthy city.
Buffalo city centers do have a high rate of panhandling and street scams, you just learn coping skills.
Until the pandemic I commuted through London by bike for about 7 years - ranging from 5 to 12 miles a day. I fell off maybe a couple of times, never hitting my head. If the OP is sustaining multiple concussions from bike riding, they're either riding a lot (bike messenger?) or riding very recklessly (or perhaps both).
I don't know why people feel compelled to always inject race or skin color into things as if only some folks of some skin color are concerned with crime and filthiness.
Once people who could not afford living in the suburbs can, they often also escape filthy cities.
In addition, you have unsafe cities like Sao Paulo and you have safe cities like Santiago or Buenos Aires. You have unsafe cities like Davao (although Duterte cleaned up some crime) and you have safe cities like Seoul or Tokyo. It's not due to color. Some cities are safe, others aren't and people who have the means to do so escape them.
LA has many hispanics who have migrated out to the suburbs... are they bad for doing so?
Lots of LatAm cities also have big suburbs and gated communities... are they "bad" for wanting to escape crime?
> I don't know why people feel compelled to always inject race or skin color into things
Was this directed at me? The two comments above me both referenced race. I didn’t inject it into the conversation, I was reacting to it being injected.
I literally quoted them saying this. Here it is again "just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there".
>This comes off as projection.
I don't understand what you think I am projecting. I'm afraid of poor brown people? I don't want white people in the city? For the record, I am a white person who has lived in the middle of various major American cities most of my life. I'm not going to argue with you if you cite housing costs, having a yard, privacy, calmness, or any of the numerous other advantages suburban life has over city living. But when I see someone complain that cities aren't "safe, clean, [or] friendly" for middle class white folks, I will call out what I see as a recycled dog whistle from the 1950s and 1960s.
>They listed several things.
I questioned those listed things because the implication behind them is not true. White people aren't waiting for cities to become safe because the cities have already gotten safe.
That quote is literally a quote of the parent post- I read it as sarcasm, rather than a genuine belief (that this thread appears to be reading as literal and hence, projecting).
The fact is, this person was clearly also the victim of violence and chose to move out because they, specifically, were not safe. There's nothing dog-whistle about it.
The nearest metro to me just had a city council meeting to discuss snow plow drivers complaining about being shot at while on the job, and their struggles in hiring other city workers who are being harassed. Their response was to recommend trauma counselling to those who were shot at.
Many people who are comfortable not living in a city (even if they would prefer it) move out when they realize they have to raise their kids there. If inner cities were as safe, clean and friendly as my rural community, I too might never have moved out. Instead, I realized that only one of my neighbors ever showed the slightest interest in talking to me, were frequently rude, and few people walked anywhere alone. In the years I've left, carjackings, theft and vandalism have gotten so much worse- to the point that in some formerly "safe" neighborhoods, you couldn't lock your car door when parking on the street because if thieves couldn't open the handle, they'd just smash a window to get in.
Life isn't perfect out in the country, but there is literally nothing about living in a big city that is attractive enough to make me want to go back to that.
Cry "dogwhistle" all you want, but skin color has nothing to do with this story.
> Cry "dogwhistle" all you want, but skin color has nothing to do with this story
Then don’t mention the skin color in the first place. I wouldn’t have replied if the two comments above me didn’t paint this as a racial issue by specifically mentioning this was an issue for middle class white people and not just middle class people.
> I literally quoted them saying this. Here it is again "just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there".
That commenter was actually quoting part of the comment above him…
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white
Middle-class white people aren't blameless for trashing cities. Look at any urban environment where they live in high concentrations (i.e. residential high rises) and observe that the sidewalks are a communal toilet for their dogs.
I've lived in a few urban environments in the US, and it's actually my preferred lifestyle and someday I'll hopefully live like that again.
However, yeah, the neighborhoods in US downtowns where I've lived do not feel safe, despite staying in fairly high end accommodations. Crazy people walking around screaming, fighting, harassing people, banging on cars, using drugs laying in the middle of the sidewalk. I would never recommend that a woman, for instance, live in those locations. It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.
>and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.
The number of people responding like this is really telling. The first comment in this chain mentioned this was a problem for white people. The person that responded repeated the comment about white people. Then I respond and say brown people only for multiple to accuse me of unnecessarily injecting race. It just shows the number of people who view white as the default. It is only "a racial issue" once brown people are mentioned.
The comment you were responding to only mentioned race by quoting someone else, and I’m pretty confident that was beside the point they were making. I thought it was silly to bring race into it initially too, but I didn’t have anything substantial to say in response to the other commenter so I didn’t mention it.
The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.
For serious though you hit the nail square. Pearl-clutching suburban types are actually moving back into the city where I'm at (to my neighborhood, among others), and it sucks in every way except my house's value is shooting up.
>They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.)
I see your point, but I think it's broader than something that can be attributed solely to cars.
I've lived in apartments and condos in the hearts of major American cities my entire adult life, and I'm surrounded by the same phenomenon in different form. I know maybe 3 of my neighbors in the hall from walking past them and saying hi once in a while, but besides that, I have basically no contact with them.
My partner grew up in an eastern European country and she tells stories of how, on holidays, people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.
I've only lived in urban well-off-millennial type places. Maybe this is something unique to the upper-middle class and above. But I don't think it's entirely about suburbia.
I think this is a great observation, and I agree that it can't be attributed solely to cars.
This is a little bit of what I was trying to get at with the "dominant cultural metaphor": the US has undergone a fundamental cultural shift around strangers for the last 50-70 years. I attribute a decent amount of that to the alienation afforded to us by driving everywhere, but it has lots of other root causes: the steady erosion of local businesses in favor of chains, the professionalization of familial and community responsibilities, and (more recently) social media's affordance of cheap engagement.
And here's the thing: a lot of those root causes are good, or (at the very least) unavoidable! Our society is still pretty unjust, but it's a lot more just than when there was a uniform expectation that women stayed home and raised children. Social media poisons our discourse, but it's also made local organizing and event planning easier than ever.
> people would go out to the hallways of her apartment building to congregate and drink and hang out. This concept seems totally alien to me. I'm pretty sure if a resident tried congregating in the hallways of any of the buildings I've lived in, security would be called to clear them out.
This is what makes the USA society so impersonal and distant. Everyone is expected, even required, to quickly retire into their home and stay there unless on specific business of going somewhere. The USA has even invented a crime for the concept of being outside for no particular reason, "loitering".
Coming from latin america we joke (although wrapped in much sadness) that every fun social activity that's normal elsewhere, will trigger the riot police to show up in the USA. When I lived in an apartment I knew everyone in the building since we'd gather to drink and play games on the central hallway on Friday nights.
So no wonder it is difficult to get to know any neighbors in the USA, let alone the entire neighborhood. Which in turn makes it easier to not care about them, which I believe is the cause of most of the social and political ills of the USA.
Very little to do with cars. Where I grew up the public transport was between useless to nonexistent, so everyone drives everywhere. But people still have fun and hang out and party on the streets or apartment hallways.
Nobody does it anymore, because the Internet has messed up human interaction patterns.
At least here in Ukraine. Well, in some cities they recently started to congregate in basements during air raid alerts, but that's hardly a positive thing. And I've heard that in Belarus, during 2020 protests, when the whole country got disconnected from the Internet for a couple of days, people really hanged out IRL much more.
A year ago, my wife and I moved from the Bay Area to rural Nevada. Within a week I found myself in some King of the Hill-esque group and now I stand around with neighbors drinking beers. I know basically everyone within 3 miles; back in the Bay I had that same apartment experience you had as did I when I was in the suburbs.
It’s led me to a theory that density limits interactions by excessive choice. We drive everywhere here (the OP original claim that was the alienator), but the entire county, 18,000 square miles, has 44,000 people in it and I see the same people at the gas station, the grocery store, the coffee shop, every time I go. So I still end up meeting people eventually just by routine.
It’s also weird how you can start to spot outsiders - the gas station I use has developed some weird social pattern that you always enter from the south and thus the cars always face the same way, so visitors don’t know that and you spot them.
My experience is similar to yours, but I wonder how it's different when you aren't "just passing through".
The way that we have structured the mix of movement-for-career and rental precarity (at the lower end) suggests that we disincentivize "putting down roots" in the way that normalizes that kind of behavior.
US apartment buildings are designed to maximize profits (rentable floorspace) and therefore contain no communal spaces, no seating. There are no stairs except dark cramped fire escapes. Some elevators are configured to prevent people from meeting. Many modern buildings are also too big to know most of your neighbors and feel part of a community.
Additionally, large leasing companies set rents to maximize profits, at the cost of turnover. It's hard to feel part of a community when people are constantly leaving and new people arriving. Residents can't feel like they belong when they expect to be priced out and forced to move in a year or two.
Capitalism produces efficient allocation of capital, but not maximum citizen quality of life.
I've toured a bunch of apartment buildings in a major city and the nicer ones often had people using the communal study areas, game rooms, lounges, fitness centers, and roof decks.
Obviously there's a cost to provide that and it's one many are willing to pay.
I've visited many expensive buildings in SF and lived in several. Those buildings do have study areas and lounges. But those places are never cozy and never designed to help people interact. They are often in a separate area or floor, away from the main entrance. The lounge areas are separated for multiple groups to use without interfering with each other. Furniture is heavy, expensive, and hideous. Tables are heavy or unmovable. There are no coffee tables. Music blares.
Architecture & design that fosters community will have a space for eating and socializing near the main entrance. When you enter or or exit the building, you can see who is there and walk over to say hello. The space will be cozy, clean, with warm lighting, good ventilation, movable chairs & tables, and no music or TV. There will be a sink with hand soap & paper towels, a microwave oven, and a hot water kettle. And a clean toilet around the corner.
I would be willing to pay for that, but so far no company has had the imagination to offer it. There's a similar lack of hot-desk co-working spaces that are suitable for coding. I would love to pay for that, too, but it doesn't exist. I've spoken with many co-working space managers and none have shown interest in making it happen.
Supporting your point, in many hotels the bar/restaurant area is visible from the lobby, which naturally invites people it to have a drink or a bite to eat. But its rare to find this architecture in apartment buildings.
This is why I loved an old Victorian-era house I once lived in, which had been converted into four apartment units. We all shared the large, deep wraparound front porch, and thus we'd occasionally gather for drinks. And neighbors would drop by, too. I miss that place.
I lived in Seattle for a while. Mentally ill, drunk, or intoxicated homeless are pretty common on the street. I witnessed shoplifting pretty often, threats and screaming people often, and people smoking crack pipes and injecting themselves pretty often. My wife was harassed or threatened multiple times by homeless people.
We moved out to the suburbs. Here, we see crowds of kids in the afternoons. They are playing in the park, roller blading, scootering around, running to one another's houses. Most of the kids are unattended and running about their own business. It seems much more natural and healthy than the environment of the city, where, not incidentally, kids were rare.
The "foreign scary place" was the city. The small community of neighbors who know one another is a friendly safe place. I would not want my kids running around the city by themselves - I don't mind it here. I don't think the reason is because of "hand wringing" or baseless worries over safety. I think the reason is that the city is overrun with mentally ill drug addicts who make a dangerous environment for unattended children.
More places are really bad now, not only downtown. Chinatown is really bad now, Ballard is bad (the walkable part of it, that is), South Seattle is bad.
There are an excessive number of people with untreated mental illness walking around in the USA. This may not be obvious if you haven’t lived elsewhere or can’t tell the difference between psychosis and alternative lifestyle choices. Untreated psychosis is dangerous, delusional people do harm others and themselves.
It’s relevant because it is a real medical problem that the US fails to deal with, as opposed to a less well defined cultural issue.
We used to deal with it, but it was considered inhumane (forced care). A social worker I know does her best to get homeless people into mental health care, but most refuse either out of fear of being locked up, or fear of having to quit their addictions.
Regan made it illegal to address this in California while he was governor, but the voters keep passing more mandatory spending on it, so we're in this screwed up situation where overfunded programs have stranded resources, and the problem keeps tailspinning, leading to more stranded resources.
We've had "car culture" and modern suburbs for many many many years, including a very large time period where none of this was an issue. Blaming it on "car culture" is completely off.
* It's a complex of things. I identify suburban culture (and car culture as a constituent element) as one member of that complex, but there's plenty of identifiable factors: increased passive awareness of our areas (24 hour news that chiefly spotlights crimes), passive surveillance of children (always available via cell phone, locatable via GPS), and so forth. It wouldn't be polemical if I didn't start with the controversial ones, though!
* Car culture and suburban culture are not things we've had for "many many many years." They're shockingly new, even by American cultural standards: modern suburbs are a postwar invention, and the cultural lodestone of being stuck in traffic on an interstate beltway somewhere outside of a major city is only a generation or two old. There are, similarly, external factors that have historically masked some of the more deleterious effects of car culture: redlining kept suburbs racially homogeneous for the first half of their history, and over half of women didn't enter the workforce until the late 1970s.
I think I covered this: I identify "suburban car culture" with the completion of interstate highways (and beltways) around major cities. The Interstate Highway System wasn't even begun until the late 1950s. And as I mentioned in the previous comment, there are confounding factors that explain why moral panic about childhood safety didn't really emerge until the mid-to-late 1980s (which, note, is about one generation after the first demographic of baby boomers was born in early suburbs).
The Satanic Panic[1] and the McMartin preschool trial[2] were both in the early 1980s, and were key moments in the popular conception of child abuse. Another wave happened in the 1990s with prominent kidnappings/murders of children, which might be the one you remember.
We've had "car culture" and suburban culture for less than ~80 years at most. It's only been increasing and spreading in that time. Likewise, the growth in insular suburban culture has been on the rise over a similar time period. I don't think it's accurate to say either is a brand new problem that's existed without the other for the majority of it's existence.
There is no world where the children of the middle class share a community and public space with untreated mentally ill homeless people who have full and equal rights to that space.
We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms. That is the real social function of car dependent geography.
> We don’t want to violently oppress people over bourgeois norms of behavior but we do want to live in communities that adhere to such norms.
Yes exactly. So we segregate them, creating a non-bourgeois underclass that plagues our cities and suburbs. Then we create more elaborate car centric human geography that causes us to pollute more and generate all sorts of externalities such as huge traffic jams and high house prices. Then because the above underclass is disregarded, they become a larger, more present part of our urban fabric who we've consigned to a segregated life of misery.
It's a lose-lose race to the bottom. All because we can't do the right thing, spending money on mental health care and assistance out of poverty. Eventually the (monetary but also human, social, and environmental) costs of maintaining the hacks ends up being higher than fixing the problem in the first place. That's what happens when you try to paper over problems without fixing them.
Being a tolerable neighbor involves skills, habits, and self control that are far from universal. Showing up to appointments and taking your meds every time is hard for yuppies with mild depression, let alone people with much looser holds on life. Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm.
People in between “cannot manage own life” and “imminent danger to self and others” are a tricky proposition for the mental health system. It only takes a handful of such people wandering around your city center continuously (seriously, it’s the same dozen faces over and over in SF) to completely change the kind of place it is.
> Inpatient mental health facilities are necesarily more coercive and less fun than the outside world. The mentally ill have civil rights too and can check themselves out unless their situation continues to meet a high bar for imminent risk of serious harm.
I didn't say kidnap and torture them like we did in the 70s. I said give them mental healthcare and housing.
People don't become junkies overnight, and a building full of single bed sized lockable (from the inside) rooms available to anyone without stable housing (without fear of the salvation army taking them off of HRT or abusing them) with a few social workers and mediators to teach those skills, a doctor, a vocational educator, and a therapist on staff 24/7 is both cheaper than policing and jail, and would go a long, long, long way towards preventing these problems in the first place.
There's absolutely no reason not to do this. It's cheaper up front than policing. It saves the same amount again on cleanup and maintenance of public spaces. It saves many times the amount of money again on reduction of crime and insurance. And it provides a portion again in people that become productive tax payers
For the ones that have already fallen to the bottom of the hole you need something more, but surely if it's doing so much damage to the entire city that out of the 300 billion gdp, the inhabitants can afford four dozen social workers and an apartment block to do nothing but try to find a way to help them.
The idea that this is even a question in the wealthiest place on earth is mindbogglingly callous and evil, and a sign of a very very sick and antisocial society that has nothing to do with the people that fell through the cracks.
Offering support to people who want it is important and necessary. I am willing to bet however that a decent sized city contains at least one and probably several people who do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers (I wouldn’t!) and will instead avail themselves of their right to shit on the floor of the train station.
> do not very much like having their lives managed by teams of social workers
Then don't manage. Serve and support. Start by bringing a sandwich, a coffee and a smoke and listening for an hour every day, not by shoving them in a cell.
Yes, it's expensive, but if it is -- as people here and elsewhere say over and over again -- making an entire area of a city uninhabitable and causing millions in damage and enforcement costs then surely it's worth the cost? Why do people seem to constantly favour being callous and cruel over even being selfish, let alone humane?
Large dense cities in certain parts of Europe and east Asia don’t face these issues (and even then, there isn’t really the same concept of large and dense in most of Europe), but I would say chaotic unfriendly cities are the default in most of the world. In a sense, many American cities act as a bridge between these two worlds. It also doesn’t help that you can fall much farther in the US than other places before anyone even begins to notice.
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
Racist much? Have any receipts to back that up? I live in a predominantly Asian neighborhood and it turns out they like living in a safe area too. Weird, huh?
And you're reading too much into the white part: the history of middle class suburbia is the history of America's white middle class, which is in turn more or less the history of America's race politics. It's not a particularly searing or piecing observation on my part.
It does, I believe they believe in reverse racism too. HN crowd isn't the best place for intelligent discussion beyond the weekly jq/sql/crypto/mobile apps as a business. And even then, most of the riff raff makes really stupid comments.
Exactly this. I agree 100%. A lot of responses are triggered folks who highlight exactly what you're saying. How dare you call suburbs sheltered, boring, and fake. A lot of responses cry about urban places being dangerous hell holes, when in fact it highlights exactly what woodruffw was saying. No one in the suburbs gives a shit about each other, because there is no sense of community. Karen in the HOA cares more about what color your door knob is, and the kids sneak to the basement when the parents are out to try out exotic drugs. Let's not kid ourselves and compare urban centers "as omg, I can't even walk my kid to school without a homeless person that molests them". Hyperbole at the best.
Stay in your suburbs, and don't use urban tax dollars to fund your lifestyle choices. And while you're at it, when you visit an urban center, learn to drive and parallel park, or does that scare you too?
I grew up in a major city and was only mugged four times and assaulted (like hit or abused) four times by randos on the street before graduating high school, starting in second grade. All with racial overtones, very explicitly so on the assaults.
Yet we (me, my parents, my educators) wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like these school workers.
I don’t think it’s the suburban white folks, though it might be. I think it’s people who buy into an everything is too dangerous mindset. That they go to suburbs is effect, not cause.
Figured the author was a dude from the title, totally surprised it wasn’t. I too suffer from the fear that if I’m around anyone’s kids other than my own, especially at a park, I’m at risk.
People living in gated communities have a higher perceived level of crime [1] than those who don't so it's not that surprising that the more isolated you are, the more you see the rest of world as dangerous
> People living in gated communities have a higher perceived level of crime [1] than those who don't so it's not that surprising that the more isolated you are, the more you see the rest of world as dangerous
Okay, their perception of crime is higher than it should be. What about the level of crime inside vs outside of the gated community?
It really doesn't matter if someone thinks that there are 4 rapes per second outside of their bubble, if the rate inside the bubble is significantly lower than the rate outside the bubble.
Thinking that it is 4 rapes per second when the actual number is 4 rapes per month is irrelevant when there are 4 rapes per decade inside the bubble.
IOW, you are not making any point worth discussing. I don't care whether my perception of crime outside of my bubble is higher than the actual crime outside of my bubble, I care whether it is more dangerous outside of my bubble than inside.
> In this study [1] in California, they've found no difference in actual crime but the gated community believed they were safer than the outside.
Not quite; they found that the crime rate as reported by the respondents to the survey did not differ. They did not look at the actual crimes reported to the law enforcement agencies.
We already know that people perceive the crime rate inaccurately; asking respondents what the crime rate is, is pointless.
> They did not look at the actual crimes reported to the law enforcement agencies.
Where are you reading this?
Page 8 of the study says they got their actual crime data from the Newport Beach Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. They compared this to their comparative perceived safety "by asking how safe the respondents felt their community was as compared to other communities."
Page 10: "The gated community showed a significantly higher rating of comparative community safety as compared with the nongated community" whereas "there was no significant difference in the per capita crime rate for the gated community as compared with the nongated community."
That was just the first paper I found when I searched for gated communities and perceived crime
It's a widely studied phenomenon. Here's a paper back in 2000 [1] about "a high-income gated community and a public housing gated community in Orange and Los Angeles counties, California" and the conclusion is basically the same.
Maybe absolute number of cases but I highly doubt crime per capita is higher in denser locations. If anything, dense population should deter crime. I suspect it's harder to break into a home or kidnap someone when there are more people around to see or hear.
This is a bizarre view. Even if you go 100% reactionary and treat every 2020 protest as a "riot," the entire year pales in comparison to a single riot in a single neighborhood during the 1960s[1]. Our modern protests (including the "violent" ones) are downright bucolic.
This reads like the opinion of the wealthy white urbanite who has never experienced anything resembling the average lifestyle of a resident in the very city they claim to know so much about.
The thing is, I like this article. I agree with it. There just isn't a correlation with helicopter parenting and statistically-average suburbs. If anything, NIMBYism/helicopter bullshit is most prevalent in wealthy urban areas.
I grew up in NYC, and saw lots of things as a kid, including very mentally unwell people running around naked.
Is it a problem? Yes. It's a problem for them; they were very clearly unwell. Was it a problem for me? I didn't really know how to react as a kid, and more than anything else I remember being sobered rather than traumatized by what I saw. If anything has maladjusted me, I don't think that was it.
No, it isn’t. We aren’t all guilty of perversions because a few guys can’t keep their dicks in their pants. The solution isn’t treating us all like criminals, it’s to get those few perverts psychiatric help.
I was much more traumatized being forced to attend Sunday school against my will than I was that one day we found a book about sex at the public library. It even had illustrations. That was much more joy than I ever got from Jesus brainwashing school with JOY written all over the walls.
It's like claiming that something from 0 to 100 should be treated as 100. Maybe, but maybe it's more correct to treat it as 0, or as 50. But in this case it's a way to to shut down discussion.
Yes, you're correct. Jane Jacobs[1] in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" wrote about how dense, walkable environments with storefronts, residents on porches contribute to the concept of friendly strangers that make areas safer. The isolation of the suburbs creates danger.
[1] Who unfortunately then proceeded to lock others out of also having this kind of quality of life by becoming a NIMBY...
This doesn’t really match my experience. The axis is different. Grover Beach is suburban and has kids flying down the sidewalks doing jumps without helmets and it’s suburban. Marin is suburban and is full of those loony racist over-concerned mums. SF has hyper-concerned people all the time and it’s dense.
There’s a panicky streak kind of person. You see them on the Internet more, I think, telling you how random things are DANGEROUS and stuff like that.
It’s not an urban/rural divide. It’s a risk tolerance thing. And since it is so common among Democrat voters (who are massively urban) it doesn’t strike me that dense urban environments relieve someone of the curse of constant fear.
> The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.
It's got nothing to do with race. Anyone who has the ability move out of a dangerous space does so, regardless of their race.
Getting them to move back in when they are perfectly fine where they are is the problem - they have no control over when and how the city may deteriorate again, and they don't want to have to take the chance of a large financial risk to move again.
It doesn't matter if cities are safe now; the suburban folk who move back in realise that they have no control over how safe it will remain.
No, it's news media's sensationalization of exceedingly rare yet awful events (for profit! More at 11). Consuming that poison turns neighbors into strangers and strangers into criminals.
How else would disconnected suburban communities be getting the same message that their kids are in danger from something as specific as trench-coated deviants or razor blade apples?
We know it started before social media but as it often does, social media has amplified the problem. I'm not sure how much blame Hollywood shares in spreading this fear.
Queens is one of the five boroughs of NYC - so it's officially a part of the city, not a suburb. It's a very large and heterogeneous place though, with housing ranging from multi-million dollar mansions to high-rise public housing projects, and neighborhoods ranging from luxury to poverty (and everything in between). Parts of it do look fairly suburban, with big areas of private houses that can be a fairly long walk from the nearest store, where everyone owns a car.
It's my opinion that you live in a bubble and see the rest of the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger (a polemical comment, but I felt compelled to share it)
> I've lived in NYC my entire life.
> hEre's mY taKe on what's wrong with more peaceful, orderly places.
For a long time I didn't understand what is wrong with suburbanites and why I just can't fit in there ever. I love living in the city and raising kids in the city is not easy thing, quite the opposite. I think you summarize and highlighted what I was not able to understand. Thank you!
A trend I've noticed in the suburbs is the paranoia and suspicion of others, and the amount of people who fantasize about society collapsing so that they finally have a reason to shoot their neighbors, should they come knocking for help. One suburban prepper told me that they stockpile weapons for exactly that reason, because when society collapses, they know they'll be ready, and they're willing to shoot anyone who wasn't prepared, even their hungry neighbors. I've heard the same and similar from others with the same inclination to lust for collapse.
I grew up in the suburbs and your diatribe is utterly foreign to me. As kids we were expected to get out of the house and not return until it was dark. I spent many days fishing in a river pond that was almost 2 miles from my house, secluded in the woods. Maybe you need to get out more. The City(tm) is not a panacea. There's no place that people are strangers with each other more than apartment complexes.
I'm glad it's not your experience. It wasn't meant to be a blanket claim about the quality of peoples' lives in the suburbs; it was a general sociological claim about how suburban construction (and car-driven socialization) in the US fosters alienation (and how that alienation turns into latent hostility to strangers).
You haven't thought about the possibility that it's not the suburbs but instead 24/7 news media combined with social media that might be a tad bit more to blame? Cars didn't make parents afraid for their kids. Lots didn't either.
With the exception of the media, I don't think you could draw a consistent chronology for any of these things across the last 30-40 years of moral panic over children's safety. US crime rates, for example, are markedly lower than they were in the 1990s, and we probably spend more on the police now as well.
The last decade statistics disagree. Country wide there is a reduction but within the some big cities it has increased significantly.
"On average, violent crime has climbed by 12 percent in U.S. cities, while property crime has declined by 33 percent since 2010. Robbery rates fell in the average U.S. city by 23 percent, while murder, rape, and aggravated assault all climbed by 25 percent or more."
Scroll down on that link and check out the crime change over the last decade "2010-2020 change".
It does look like a handful of cities are really really bad and may be skewing things.
It's my opinion that a great deal of the blame (if not the outright majority) for this state of affairs can be levied against suburban culture (and, by extension, car culture).
The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white. They drive their children everywhere, and thereby are (somewhat) alienated from the idea of a "local community" beyond the immediate neighborhood (which can only be entered or exited by car.) Things like childcare are purchasable services, not kindnesses that you or your neighbor do for each other when the other's in a pinch. When this is your bubble (or, for the rest of us, the dominant cultural metaphor for responsible parenting), it's hard not to see the world as a foreign and scary place, with unknown levels of unknown danger.