West Coast baby
Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can’t really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I’m not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don’t understand how you’re gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn’t live there, it’s too impersonal.
The community would be those who you see at the same café or whatever. Ideally places would have some kind of board or system for people to organize activities. These could be political or just something fun, like a board game night or other things.
As for the kid thing, in many cities the kids will commute to school or other places on their own. We’ve created a system where that’s unsafe in almost all locations in the US, but it isn’t required. We have a society of helicopter parents, partially out of necessity because kids can’t get anywhere on their own.
I understand what’s trying to be said here but I’d pass on that.
I’ve lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can’t hear what my neighbors are saying, don’t need to pay for laundry, don’t need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don’t have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I’m not going back to an apartment.
I can’t hear my neighbors, don’t need an elevator, and don’t need a garage because I don’t need a car. I don’t have a back yard but I’m pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it’s not required.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it’s just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother’s apartment I can hear his neighbor’s coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit’s got tissues for walls I swear.
Yeah it won’t really solve it in a single city though. NYC has tons and tons of dense urban housing but still insane housing prices.
Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?
The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.
The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.
