Metropolises are not soulless, as a rule. They are dynamic and exciting, with an influx of ambitious young people every year trying their best to start something.
You don't need a big home space when any cafe can become your living room, any restaurant your kitchen, dining room and wait staff, and any park your professionally tended garden.
Your choice of entertainment, especially live entertainment, is mainly limited by your willingness to keep up with what's going on, and not by the sparse calendar of touring acts.
Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
“[W]hen you are comfortable spending money” is the kicker, though. Unfortunately, the Bay Area is oppressively expensive, and the same can be said about places like New York City. High housing prices puts a major strain on the ability to enjoy restaurants and paid entertainment. Also, because the restaurant owners and workers need to pay high rents, the food prices are very high. It’s hard to enjoy $3000 studio apartments, $12 burritos that used to only cost $8 before the pandemic, and other high costs when you’re not rich. I make a low six-figure salary as a professor in the Bay Area and I’ve had to cut back on eating out in the past year since the prices have gotten obscenely expensive.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Tokyo is a vibrant metropolis that is also relatively affordable by global standards. The key to this is sensible housing policy that doesn’t inflate the cost of living to oppressive levels.
What keeps me in the Bay Area besides being tenure-track are proximity to family, the acceptance of multiculturalism, and (as an academic) California’s support for academia in a national political climate that has become hostile to academia. But financially I wish the price of rent, food, and other necessities weren’t so oppressive.
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.
That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
I don't think you get what living in a busy city is. The "pod" is where you sleep, the city is your home. You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Maybe it is not the lifestyle for you, but I don't find it "insane" to want to have plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
You are certainly correct that it's a matter of lifestyle preference.
> You don't need half an acre to sleep.
Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
> plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".
Exhaust, brake dust, sirens, litter, concrete jungle, noisy neighbors with thin walls, massive crowds/traffic... there are tradeoffs to living in a dense city.
I think the Pareto optimal living conditions in the US today are the suburbs bordering the rural outskirts. Especially now with WFH prevalence.
> Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?
Some cities provide shared gardens, but it is a niche thing.
> How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?
Most cities have parks.
> How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?
You go to the countryside.
But sure, if you like these things, maybe living in a city is not the best. The thing is that there are solutions. In the same way that if you live in the countryside, you can still go to cultural and sport events, fancy restaurants and bars, but it will take a trip, and you also have to consider that driving and drinking is not great. If you love these things, maybe you should live in a city instead.
I am not a fan of suburbs as there is essentially nothing you can do without driving. For me, it would be my last choice, as it tends to be expensive compared to the countryside, and not as calm. An intermediate choice that can make sense, but not a Pareto optimal.
It reminds me of an ad campaign for a travel agency a while ago, I can't remember the details. But one of them depicted a large city labeled "hell" and next to it, some place in the middle of nowhere labeled "heaven". Under it, the same pictures with the labels swapped.
Half an acre in the middle of nowhere, where you need to drive everywhere or a pod in walkable distance to everything you need, all services and entertainment?
Are you really not understanding that there are people who have different preferences than you do?
I grew up in a rural area, with a decent-sized house and garden, surrounded by nature. It had its pros and cons. I’ve now spent a couple of decades living in large cities, and I love it. I personally don’t need all that private space, I enjoy having many people from all over the world around me and the endless options for culture, food and entertainment. When I get older still, my priorities may change again, or maybe they won’t.
I don’t think you’re insane for making other choices than I have, but you seem to lack both imagination and empathy if you can’t wrap your head around why not everyone feels the way you do.
I do have empathy, thats why I can honestly say you are wrong.
HN is largely comprised of people who are disproportionate beneficiaries of modern society, so its not a surprise that people here develop a pathological ideology that goes as far as valuing the trappings of modern society. It is like in Huxley, the purpose of soma and orgy porgies are to keep people from noticing how fucked up their world is. It is fucked up to live inside pods stacked and crammed up to the clouds - so what is the soma?
All the "vibrant" amenities available in the city. But why would you want to work on a laptop in a cafe when you can work on a quad monitor in underwear looking out over your own literal fiefdom? The amenities are substitutes not the real thing. You shouldn't be fooled.
I think suburbia is this uncanny valley between the convenience of true urban living and the peace and simplicity of true rural living. You still have to subject yourself to traffic and driving everywhere, can’t grow enough food to sustain yourself, have to spray your lawn with carcinogens to satisfy the HOA, etc etc etc.
I will say that Canadian suburbia (at least Vancouver area) is subtly different from US suburbia in a way that makes it vastly more livable. My parents house is right next to a river trail with mostly ungroomed foliage, still somewhat walkable for groceries and restaurants, and has passable public transit.
Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you. And work is not the only place people go to in a city. Add all those other amenities other commenters already spoke about, and your half-acre would have to be in the middle of at least a mid-size town.
Obviously that would be nice, but not even HNers are rich enough to build rural villas in city centres.
> Half an acre that you have to care about, mind you.
I have an acre and maintaining it's quite a nice alternative to computers and screen based entertainment. It's just another form of exercise basically.
The fact that different people have different preferences is why its great that we have options for where to live. People like you can have space in the countryside and people who prefer to spend their time at cafes/restaurants/other city activities can live in apartments. Why is the pissing match necessary?
You simply do not know what you are talking about. I live in an urban city. I have a yard, fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and birds singing. Don't have a creek running behind my house, but there is one a half mile away, plus there is the whole SF Bay, and Redwood parks accessible on bus routes _within_ the city.
Mate why do you assume I haven't experienced it myself? I've done city living, I moved out thanks to wfh.
Yes there are people who live in houses in or near the city. Most people live in pods. We're talking about the "influx of young ambitious people" remember?
At the very least, even if you can afford it, to own a home in the city for most people means putting off FIRE which I think is poor decision making.
Econ 101: people aren’t paying $3,000 a month because everyone in business has failed to think about opening an office in the suburbs. Walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they’re so desirable that Americans pay a premium to live there. The answer should be removing the barriers preventing builders from supplying that demand.
I don't think this is actually quite the case when you look historically. What seems to be the case is that cities have a sort of S-shaped demand curve, where a fraction of people are willing pay a huge premium to be near their job and their entertainment, and many others need housing to be dirt cheap to live in the metaphorical pod. In other words, it's not that the demand curve is just higher than the suburbs: the demand curve is more sloped. Cities then constrain their housing supply so that landlords end up only serving high-premium customers, ensuring that the surplus here goes to landlords and not to renters.
People often talk about supply and demand until this subject comes up. “How can you stand to live somewhere so expensive?” “Because it’s so nice that many people want to live here.” “Impossible!”
The high COL is proof that people enjoy it and are voting with their wallets. It’s not as though everyone here is ignorant of the existence of Oklahoma. I’ve lived there-ish. I pay extra not to have to anymore.
So the open market voted and decided that the area can support a high COL, but we'll choose every explanation other than that people want to live here.
Now, why are the jobs there? Is it because everyone wants to pay tons more for housing, or is it because people with higher incomes are willing to pay for better living conditions and everyone else is pulled along? Tech didn’t used to be anywhere near this concentrated but over the decades people moved out of declining cities and that produced the current hyper-concentration. That cycle is brutal - you have cities like Rochester which have a lot of comparatively cheap real estate but until the senior management want to live there, they won’t have enough businesses for any skilled workers not to think they’d be screwed if their current employment changes because there aren’t many alternatives.
Doesn’t that suggest that there is so much demand that successive waves of people have settled for the closest in they can afford? I remember people talking about being priced into a hefty commute during the dotcom bubble and only the top tech workers saw income growth keeping pace with real estate prices since then.
