It is absolutely nonsensical to think that someone who creates a thing should be held responsible for every negative use or misuse of what they create. It's even more nonsensical to expect someone to come up with every single one of these scenarios that could possibly happen. It's just not realistic, doable or even helpful. At best, it will have an extensively negative effect as every single new development will be tut-tutted into the shadows by a group of hand-wringers, terrified of a user 7 sigmas away from the mean might do with it one day. This is an appalling way to construct a society, let alone a discipline that requires rapid, ground-breaking iteration.
It's that expensive because of the population density and government meddling. There's no need for that in the US...are you saying we should artificially charge the pants off of everyone driving to work just to force them to use public transport? Why? I like my car. I like driving my car. I don't want to ride a train, or a bus. If I can work to the office, I will. I'll drive everywhere else.
"Government meddling" is the primary reason parking is so cheap in the US. Typically the law requires a minimum amount of parking. People like myself who don't own cars tend to subsidize those who do.
I recall some sort of economic study that suggested rents would drop by hundreds of dollars per month if parking minimums could be eliminated. (No time to find it right now, sorry.) I'd take that, as right now my apartment gives me two parking spots that I can't do anything with. (A previous apartment manager complained when I used the spot for storage. Cars only, I guess. Renting to others would not be practical, either.)
This is why we need higher gas taxes. Driving is much more pleasant than the alternatives to most Americans, until the true cost of their behavior is reflected at the pump we'll keep going in circles.
Right now my outrageous urban rent and taxes are subsidizing your driving privileges. Real estate for garages instead of housing/retail and road lanes for cars over pedestrians/cyclists. Those costs need to be passed on to the suburban drivers and not the car-less city dwellers.
Unfortunately the political will for gas taxes is null and we'll be left with draconian measures like car holidays and congestion tolls which won't alleviate the need to provide car infrastructure for peak demand, which is artificially high due to the distorted market.
Government run cities. Without "government meddling", you would not have public roads or street lights. You should visit London, Tokyo or Amsterdam. Hopefully it will change your views on how denser US cities may look like. I also like my car but the ability to walk places is really under appreciated in the US.
It is because of government meddling that the US doesn't have high density living.
Yes, please please please let's get the government OUT of the housing market, and let's get rid of those building height limits that disallow anything above 6 stories, even though rent is in the thousands of dollars for a studio.
You should be allowed to drive your car and live in whatever low density place you want. Can you offer the same thing for me, by allowing the market to produce high density living as well?
Don't forget getting rid of parking minimums that add so much to the cost of construction that it adds hundreds of dollars to the monthly rent of an apartment in a typical urban area.
America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.
I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.
Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.
Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size.
Click around a bit, explore the neighbourhood, get a sense for the place. Get the picture?
American urban development happens on a scale that is simply incomprehensible to most Europeans. I spent a good ten minutes clicking around Boulder, looking for the city centre; it took me that long to realise that there wasn't one, at least not in the sense that I understand.
Pearl Street is the main drag. It's essentially a college town although a fair bit of tech has moved in. It's actually pretty walkable but Boulder is very protective of open spaces and conservative about growth generally so you're not going to see anything like a dense urban core. Somewhere like Ithaca NY isn't that different.
Of course, you wouldn't want to live in Boulder without a car. Pretty much the whole point of being there is to get into the mountains.
Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand.
So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article.
1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
Oh I agree. Maybe for a few years after school if I had a job in the city I could imagine a handful or two of cities that I might forgo owning given the various options like Zipcar and Uber available today. But long term? I'm not sure there's any US city other than NYC/Manhattan where I wouldn't. (And I wouldn't live there.)
I've walked a couple hundred kilometers in San Francisco and I saw significantly less than when I did the same in Tokyo. I wouldn't call SF walkable at all.
In the predominantly hispanic areas around Phoenix there are tons of tiny shops serving the neighborhood -- it's a thing. Where I live now there used to be a few corner markets but now that gentrification is in full swing they are all gone and are being replaced with trendy restaurant/bars with the people presumably now shopping at the major supermarkets. There were probably more before they built the super-massive Ranch Market but I didn't live in this area then so can't really say.
I'd venture to say it has more to do with the cost of owning/operating a car, in Mexico (and much of Europe) they are significantly more costly than the US so the convenience of "shopping local" is different.
The supermarket test isn't really a very good one. If I'm standing in Chinatown in San Francisco or Boston I can easily imagine that I'm more than a mile away from the nearest supermarket. But I will in no way be lacking in non-packaged food options.
"In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas."
The real question one should be asking is how much of that is by choice?
Plus the "within 1 mile" standard seem a little low, that would mean that every single urban grocery store would have multiple competitors within a 2 mile radius which is totally unrealistic though, apparently, is quite common.
America definitely doesn't have plenty of cities that are like cities in Europe and Asia in particular (where I've lived and traveled most outside of the US).
As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.
The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.
What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.
Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)
Yeah I used to love the city and all the action too. But I tired of the filth, noise, hassle. I just wanted peace and quiet so I moved to the country. Couldn’t believe how much I loved the quiet. Also I love how dark it is at night and being able to see stars. When I get home, the air is noticeably fresher too. I can more or less do what I want to do on my property without anyone telling me what to do. I would have never thought I’d have loved it as much as I do.
If ONLY your "distopian nightmare" of high density cities were true.
In reality it is the opposite. The vast vast majority of space in the US is reserved for the low density living.
Even the supposedly "high density" cities in the US are nothing compared to what they could be. Even places like New York have difficulty building enough housing to house everyone who wants to live there.
I just want a single city, in the entire world, where everyone said "hey, let's just allow building to be as high as anyone wants, and not put a single building restriction on anything".
The people who want low density living having an entire world to choose from. And yet that's apparently not enough for them.
"America is big enough for cities to spread out" is a terrible meme. It's not like cities in other countries are right next to each other and if you lowered the density by a factor of two or three there would be war between the cities over who gets to own that new parking lot.
It uses Xeon processors, AMD Vega GPUs, has incredibly fast PCIE NVMe SSD storage, and obviously contains a 27" 5k display...just because you can't take out the hard drive doesn't mean it's not a desktop machine. This is a weird statement to make. Companies using these machines are not interested in physically upgrading them...they use them as long as they can, then buy the newer, faster version.
