Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.
Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school.
Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
Soviet-style micro-districs aren't that great. Its just modernist ideas done cheaply.
Soviet-style certainly is better then US style suberbia but its not actually good compared to real urbanism.
What you actually want is not a bunch of identical blocks spaced far apart. You want proper streets with connected blocks with commercial in the lower floors to frame a real urban feeling. That has many advantages. You can still provide real public parks and open spaces in such a structure (see Oslo for example).
There is a reason tons of tourist go to places that are beautiful urbanism and almost nobody goes even to the best Soviet microdistrics to look at them. And nicer building wouldn't change that.
> Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
And yet somehow the capitalist west has built amazing cities and towns for 100s of years.
And places like the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark are very much on the forefront of modern example of these things.
Dude. A huge percentage of the US is ZONED for single family homes. If those are SOOO attractive, why don't they remove that zoning and let competition win out?
There's SOOO much legislation in the US that freezes everything in place (when zoning doesn't cut it they just add 100 rules like minimum parking and achieve the same thing) and then someone like you points to the result and says: "see, everyone wants it".
The US basically has 2 types of housing, overwhelmingly: single family homes and residential skyscrapers. The stuff in the middle is low digit percentages.
> Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great.
Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here.
If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
> Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
Kind of? A large master-planned community might have thousands of homes and its own commercial district. They've always reminded me a bit of historic small towns.
Along that main street you had mix buildings where people lived and did their business out of. There was no separation between living and commercial.
Farmers lived further out, not directly connected to the city.
From there cities cities grow incrementally up and incrementally out. At some point they stop. Brainerd now has the same amount of people as they did 70 years ago. Other cities, like New York sustained that phase much longer.
> Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly.
In fact, the sprawling nature of suberbia is what destroys the most amount of nature and makes it harder for everybody to access nature.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas.
The term 'Suberbia' talkes specifically about US style subburbs and just based on facts, 99% of it simple doesn't allow commercial usage.
Sometimes you have commercial zones next to the R1 zones, but usually the ratio is very small and the distance to the commercial zone is very far for the majority of people. Thus commercial areas are often reached mostly by car.
Mixed use zoning is almost nowhere to be found in most of the US.
The term 'Suberbia' refers to that.
> We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Then it isn't really what is called 'subberbia' at all. Subburbs can be done well, but not subberbia.
And in most places in the US where there is a massive lack of alternative housing options with a vanishingly small part of the total land area allowing anything but low-density residential zoning.
So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore. And the amount of places where it was done well is incredibly small.
> That such a hilarious understanding of 'nature' and 'cities'. I live in a city and I can be in nature very quickly.
Which city? It's always helpful to look at google maps to see if people are using terms in a different way.
A city by definition is surrounded by suburb (sub-urbe) and neither is forest, so if you live in the city you need to get to the suburbs and the cross the suburbs before you can get to a forest (or desert/etc).
I'm sure there's some city somewhere where the highrise apartment building transition immediately to forest, but I'm not sure where. Not common, for sure.
> So yes, subburbs can be done well, but if its done well its not called 'subburbia' anymore.
This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
Its just a very American views. I know its crazy to think but not every city in the world is surrounded by endless suburban sprawl.
And if you have a good train connection, you can go out of a city very fast an efficiently.
Zürich, you have forest 1.6km from the downtown train station. Or 9min with public transport to an even larger forest.
To small? Ok, lets look at Berlin. From main train-station, you have a gigantic park only a few minutes away. If that isn't nature enough for you, its a 7.5km distance to a forest outside of the city.
Amsterdam, less then 5km to be in the surrounding country side.
Vienna, 4km to country side, 7km to a nature reserve.
I have not been in any European city where going into to country side isn't trivially easy. Even my 80+ year old grandmother who lived in the cities former industrial area would go for daywalks in nature.
> This is a circular claim. So if a suburb works well it's not a suburb?
No its not 'suberbia'. 'Suberbia' has a particular definition.
This video gives some perspective of what I am talking about:$
> Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car! Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
It's not even true in the United States. In the Boston area, there are still plenty of those "strong towns" the bloggists go on about. I live in one. My car gets used to go to Home Depot, to drive to visit my parents four hours away, and if I need to go to my doctor who's just a little too far off the beaten path to drive to. The rest of the time, I walk, and I'm within a mile of a commuter rail station to get to Boston proper.
Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.
>Your towns aren't built for walkers and public transport and that sucks, but there's no need to project that to everywhere else!
And I'd say you're grossly mischaracterizing the US. Every small town I've lived in has ample sidewalks, crosswalks, and is easily walkable. Where my children go to school I can walk from one end of town to the other without ever having to risk life and limb. Heck a few of the sidewalks extend a mile out into the country just in anticipation of the city eventually growing. The town I grew up in was the same. The entire US isn't small-town Texas.
> Good Christ, I lived for years in small towns in the most rural area of the UK without a car!
The UK is smaller than the US state of Oregon, which is the 9th largest state in terms of area.
There is literally nowhere in the UK that counts as "rural" by US standards. The UK has a population density of 277/km^2, while the United States as a whole has only 35/km^2. The comparison is much worse if you look at western/northern states like North Dakota (4/km^2) or Alaska (0.5/km^2). Even California (widely considered a very crowded state) has only 250/km^2, still considerably less than the UK. In fact, there are only 4 states of 50 which have a greater population density than the UK.
The old saying that Americans consider a hundred years a long time, while the British consider a hundred miles a long distance seems to be accurate even in the long term.
An American website by ownership - the actual users are pretty international. And anyway, the county I lived in was about 100 people per square mile, it about 184th in that list. Around the same as Alabama.
Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run.
The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers.
These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'.
In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion.
Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
> Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run.
Cheap for who, though?
As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
