We should knock down the suburbs and use that land for sustainable energy generation, food production, or let it re-wild to support conservation efforts!
Its less about how much land is being used and more about the accessibility of that land. By suburbia being spread out so much, transportation becomes more difficult to implement. Many suburbs are so far away from a simple groccery store that walking there is unreasonable at best. Being so spread out also means we need to spend more resources to provide services. Thats more miles of roadways, water pipes and electrical lines that need to be installed and maintained.
There are other important things to consider too besides just total land area like wildlife corridors, stormwater management, and access to nature as an amenity.
We should knock down the suburbs and use that land for sustainable energy generation, food production, or let it re-wild to support conservation efforts!
is not a meaningful argument because the amount of food you could produce instead of the suburbs is negligible. But also yeah, suburbs suck for lots of reasons, as you said.
High density isn’t the only alternative to suburbia. Walkable villages — the way people lived pretty much everywhere in Europe outside of Paris, London, Berlin etc. — are not suburbs but they’re also not high density apartment blocks.
The difference between a village and suburbia is specialization. Suburbia is specialized to housing only whereas a village is a self-contained community with both housing, small businesses, an industry or two, and surrounding wilderness as well as agricultural land.
Villages are not sprawling, they’re fairly small, and they’re connected into a network of other villages as well as larger towns and cities. In the past, this connection was via a road network (usually unpaved dirt roads for walking or horses, but some cobblestone roads too). Today this connection could be via train and even high speed train.
The real problem though is that we can’t just start over. We’re stuck with the infrastructure and planning choices we already made.
“High density” doesn’t just mean high rise apartments. Your example of a small, walkable village with combined/mixed-use space necessarily has high density housing. High density housing just means housing options that reduce sprawl and make public services easily accessible, usually by foot.
So we agree that sprawl and specialization are the problems, which is the important bit. I was being hyperbolic when I suggested we knock down all the suburbs, but I do think that suburbs are a terrible way to plan a community, and we should stop building them now and convert the ones we have into denser, more walkable communities.
High density, which in my opinion starts with mixed use apartment buildings have business underneath them on the ground floor, are way better than suburbs.
Mixed use allows for businesses to integrate with the community in literally the same footprint, which adds walkability and drives commerce. Plus, the more mixed use you have, the easier it is to have laborers live closer to their place of work, reducing commute time and costs while promoting more balanced lifestyles.
Obviously mixed use is one solution of many, but there are so many benefits to higher density living compared to suburbia.
No. They’re not. That’s a personal opinion and not objective in any way. You want to force every human into some government subsidized housing development.
My issue is more on the “apartment building” aspects. Apartments suck, sharing walls/floors/ceiling with others sucks. Lots of apartments means lots of opportunity for just one apartment to get infested with something that will quickly spread to others even if they do nothing to attract said pests (e.g. keeping a really clean place)
Or just one dumbass flooding the place or a fire breaks out
Apartments also means constantly having to worry about being too loud or dealing with others who don’t care
If there’s a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
I don’t disagree with single family houses existing. I think they have their use, but they should reflect their actual cost. Suburbs right now don’t pay for their roads or their transit.
High density shouldn’t have to subsidise people who want low density. Likewise the suburbs shouldn’t subsidise high density, but high density is far far less costly
If there’s a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
It’s called decent quality. All the problems you mentioned fall back on every corner being cut in our profit-driven societies. Just because you’re in an apartment doesn’t mean that ANY of that should ever happen. We somehow have giant buildings housing dozens or, rarely, hundreds of companies, and they have protective measures in place for fires and water damage.
I think all of your complaints can similarly be made in suburbia. You may have a neighbor that’s drunk, and plays music loud into the night. Someone may have bright flood lights that shine over their yard into yours. Someone may grow a certain plant that’s invasive, and it travels by wind to your yard. The wood the neighbor 3 hours down installed attracts pests, which could make their way to your house, eventually. Someone could start a fire, and the wind carries it to the neighbors next door or next street over, like what we saw in California earlier this year.
While yes apartments mean we all live closer together, that doesn’t mean people will be twats. People can be twats anywhere.
The solution to this obviously is to live more and more rurally so your impact is less and less to your neighbors. But that sounds antithetical to your beliefs. And no, regulating people’s lives with HOAs isn’t the solution. HOAs suck.
There is single family, high density housing. Explore your closest big city. The closest one to me is Chicago, where a lot of the northern neighborhoods have super dense, single family homes.
Have you seen any of the mixed use suburb development concepts? I think they’re really cool, basically a whole block that has a wide range of housing options and amenities all self contained from single family to apartments
While we’re at it, we might as well outfit everyone’s quarters with a replicator and install transporters in the buildings so we don’t need to bother with food prep or vehicles at all!
in the city where i live, every trip by public transport typically involves 10 minutes of walking - 5 minutes to the bus station and 5 minutes from the bus station to the final destination.
if you think that’s a problem, think again. movement is good for your physiology, and public transport makes you move naturally.
You just need regular, quick service within bicycle/motorbike range. There’s unmanned platforms in Japan that have a daily ridership of literally 2 people, usually the same person taking the train to work.
I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.
Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.
There’s opposition in Japan too. They just break through it, by legal means, extra-legal means, and if that’s too slow, throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Same with Korea, same with China. Trust has nothing to do with the economics of being able to operate trains.
Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.
China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.
I mean we did it to build the hoover dam. The legal mechanisms to do so still exist. The political will doesn’t because mass transit is bad for oil and car manufacturers.
The US of the 1930s is just as foreign of a country as China or Japan today, if not more so. You overestimate the ability of car manufacturers to generate political will. This is a societal-level breakdown in trust in political institutions that goes way beyond transit issues. There are millions of Americans who want nothing more than to burn their government to the ground and rebuild it in their own image. Watch some YouTube videos of city council meetings over almost any issue and you’ll see people who look like they need to be restrained before they pull each other’s hair out.
Tracks are cool but kinda difficult to cover the suburbs with them!
You know what, you’re right.
We should knock down the suburbs and use that land for sustainable energy generation, food production, or let it re-wild to support conservation efforts!
according to this map
approximately 1% of all habitable land on earth is used for housing and any kind of transport (streets, tracks) while 50% is used for agriculture.
the amount of land we use for housing is absolutely negligible. if you tear down all suburbs, you barely save any land area. it’s just not worth it.
though suburbs still suck, but for different reasons.
Its less about how much land is being used and more about the accessibility of that land. By suburbia being spread out so much, transportation becomes more difficult to implement. Many suburbs are so far away from a simple groccery store that walking there is unreasonable at best. Being so spread out also means we need to spend more resources to provide services. Thats more miles of roadways, water pipes and electrical lines that need to be installed and maintained.
There are other important things to consider too besides just total land area like wildlife corridors, stormwater management, and access to nature as an amenity.
yeah i know, i was just pointing out that
is not a meaningful argument because the amount of food you could produce instead of the suburbs is negligible. But also yeah, suburbs suck for lots of reasons, as you said.
I’d be with ya except for one tiny issue, living in high density housing sucks ass
Could we/should we condense suburbia down? Absolutely. Should we get rid of it entirely in favor of high density? Fuck no
High density housing comes in many forms, and all of them suck way less ass than suburbia.
Suburbs ditch all the convenience of a walkable, urban environment and replace that with all the transportation woes of living out in the boonies.
High density isn’t the only alternative to suburbia. Walkable villages — the way people lived pretty much everywhere in Europe outside of Paris, London, Berlin etc. — are not suburbs but they’re also not high density apartment blocks.
The difference between a village and suburbia is specialization. Suburbia is specialized to housing only whereas a village is a self-contained community with both housing, small businesses, an industry or two, and surrounding wilderness as well as agricultural land.
Villages are not sprawling, they’re fairly small, and they’re connected into a network of other villages as well as larger towns and cities. In the past, this connection was via a road network (usually unpaved dirt roads for walking or horses, but some cobblestone roads too). Today this connection could be via train and even high speed train.
The real problem though is that we can’t just start over. We’re stuck with the infrastructure and planning choices we already made.
“High density” doesn’t just mean high rise apartments. Your example of a small, walkable village with combined/mixed-use space necessarily has high density housing. High density housing just means housing options that reduce sprawl and make public services easily accessible, usually by foot.
So we agree that sprawl and specialization are the problems, which is the important bit. I was being hyperbolic when I suggested we knock down all the suburbs, but I do think that suburbs are a terrible way to plan a community, and we should stop building them now and convert the ones we have into denser, more walkable communities.
High density, which in my opinion starts with mixed use apartment buildings have business underneath them on the ground floor, are way better than suburbs.
Mixed use allows for businesses to integrate with the community in literally the same footprint, which adds walkability and drives commerce. Plus, the more mixed use you have, the easier it is to have laborers live closer to their place of work, reducing commute time and costs while promoting more balanced lifestyles.
Obviously mixed use is one solution of many, but there are so many benefits to higher density living compared to suburbia.
Don’t think we’re in disagreement, btw
No. They’re not. That’s a personal opinion and not objective in any way. You want to force every human into some government subsidized housing development.
While I didn’t give evidence, at least I gave reasons.
You rejected my claims and reasons with no evidence or reasons of your own, then went ahead and put words in my mouth.
U mad bro?
My issue is more on the “apartment building” aspects. Apartments suck, sharing walls/floors/ceiling with others sucks. Lots of apartments means lots of opportunity for just one apartment to get infested with something that will quickly spread to others even if they do nothing to attract said pests (e.g. keeping a really clean place)
Or just one dumbass flooding the place or a fire breaks out
Apartments also means constantly having to worry about being too loud or dealing with others who don’t care
If there’s a version of high density that also allows for Single Family Housing for those who want it, id be cool with that
I don’t disagree with single family houses existing. I think they have their use, but they should reflect their actual cost. Suburbs right now don’t pay for their roads or their transit.
High density shouldn’t have to subsidise people who want low density. Likewise the suburbs shouldn’t subsidise high density, but high density is far far less costly
It’s called decent quality. All the problems you mentioned fall back on every corner being cut in our profit-driven societies. Just because you’re in an apartment doesn’t mean that ANY of that should ever happen. We somehow have giant buildings housing dozens or, rarely, hundreds of companies, and they have protective measures in place for fires and water damage.
I think all of your complaints can similarly be made in suburbia. You may have a neighbor that’s drunk, and plays music loud into the night. Someone may have bright flood lights that shine over their yard into yours. Someone may grow a certain plant that’s invasive, and it travels by wind to your yard. The wood the neighbor 3 hours down installed attracts pests, which could make their way to your house, eventually. Someone could start a fire, and the wind carries it to the neighbors next door or next street over, like what we saw in California earlier this year.
While yes apartments mean we all live closer together, that doesn’t mean people will be twats. People can be twats anywhere.
The solution to this obviously is to live more and more rurally so your impact is less and less to your neighbors. But that sounds antithetical to your beliefs. And no, regulating people’s lives with HOAs isn’t the solution. HOAs suck.
There is single family, high density housing. Explore your closest big city. The closest one to me is Chicago, where a lot of the northern neighborhoods have super dense, single family homes.
High density is pretty sweet. I walk outside and there’s like 3 groceries within a short walk. Sprawl and wastelands kind of suck
Or maybe we could rip all the car sewers out and put a nice park in instead. It would make high density housing a lot nicer, yah?
Have you seen any of the mixed use suburb development concepts? I think they’re really cool, basically a whole block that has a wide range of housing options and amenities all self contained from single family to apartments
If it’s high density with the option of single family housing integrated, I’m fine with that. I just hate apartments
While we’re at it, we might as well outfit everyone’s quarters with a replicator and install transporters in the buildings so we don’t need to bother with food prep or vehicles at all!
in the city where i live, every trip by public transport typically involves 10 minutes of walking - 5 minutes to the bus station and 5 minutes from the bus station to the final destination.
if you think that’s a problem, think again. movement is good for your physiology, and public transport makes you move naturally.
You just need regular, quick service within bicycle/motorbike range. There’s unmanned platforms in Japan that have a daily ridership of literally 2 people, usually the same person taking the train to work.
I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.
Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.
There’s opposition in Japan too. They just break through it, by legal means, extra-legal means, and if that’s too slow, throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Same with Korea, same with China. Trust has nothing to do with the economics of being able to operate trains.
Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.
China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.
I mean we did it to build the hoover dam. The legal mechanisms to do so still exist. The political will doesn’t because mass transit is bad for oil and car manufacturers.
The US of the 1930s is just as foreign of a country as China or Japan today, if not more so. You overestimate the ability of car manufacturers to generate political will. This is a societal-level breakdown in trust in political institutions that goes way beyond transit issues. There are millions of Americans who want nothing more than to burn their government to the ground and rebuild it in their own image. Watch some YouTube videos of city council meetings over almost any issue and you’ll see people who look like they need to be restrained before they pull each other’s hair out.