What a fantastic site! Wish more titea were build this way. It was an awesome experience!
I’m an outsider living in Spain for the last 22 years, I think that while the content portrays a reality of the high rise movement in Spain, there is an angle that was missed. It is important to say that the at time draconian land laws pay an important role in the urban landscape. Not to mention that Spain relative young democracy ( we won’t talk about that the today ) also plays am important role into shaping the urban seen. Lots of change in the government parties have also lead to constrains and or retains during several periods. Ok his has mean that different areas would grow artificially dependent on the “favoritism” at play at the moment through favorable zoning changes or subsidized public housing. Albeit and thankfully at the moment, Spain has not discovers property taxes like the US, it contains growth with little planning and driven by massive speculation which has been an economic driver for major cities even with relative low occupation rates. There is also the fundamental culture of buy vs rent that drives for more flats been built to keep up with the demand. On the plus side, one the the biggest differences I have seen in Spain is a relative wide spread economic demographic in the cities, where you don’t see the major changes like most other major city across the world, it happens but it’s neither common or as drastic as the rest.
Unpopular opinion but I hate the design of the site. The transitions are too slow and the entire site is inaccessible to anyone with vertigo, visual processing or balance disorders. Needless to say it also doesn't respect the browser's `prefers-reduced-motion` preference.
Spaniard here, I expected to see an infographic basically based around Madrid and Barcelona but it seems that special care has been taken to cover the whole country, kudos to El Diario team.
One thing that annoyed me is that I constantly had to pause and Google all the locations. They really could have put some images about the different places and buildings so that it's easier to imagine what they were talking about.
... and I think I'm about to throw up, but that's a smaller issue, I take one for the team to encourage creative web development.
What's interesting is that the Netherlands is pretty low on the list of countries with the highest percentage of people in collective dwellings (at 21% vs Spain's 65%, only the UK is lower), even though it's one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. I suppose that's the result of the mentioned "mushroom neighbourhoods"?
From what I’ve seen while cycling between cities in the Netherlands, the “rural” areas still have houses frequently (and even more in “urban” areas - for example between The Hague and Rotterdam you probably won’t be able to go 500m without finding a house/building).
However, the density of most cities isn’t that high (most/median residential buildings are probably 4-5 floors or less, except Rotterdam).
For comparison Mumbai has way more taller buildings than almost any city in the Netherlands except for Rotterdam, and Mumbai hasn’t had a lot of high rises due to FSI limitations.
Yeah, I think often the Netherlands makes more sense if you just think of the Randstad -or even the entirety of the Netherlands- as a big city. Population-wise, that's not a crazy idea either. Then obviously it will be denser than an entire country like Spain, while it can still be less dense than actual cities within Spain.
In the Netherlands an exceptional high percentage of houses are social - so they should not be expensive. But most of them are single family houses connected 'rijtjeshuis'. Think of them as flat buildings flipped over. I can imagine with the countries muddy soil it was the cheaper solution to build this way.
About weight, you can see the strength of the soil in the historic buildings. Like Delft: 3 stories high. Zaandam: 2 stories where one is build from wood. Amsterdam is build on wooden piles allowing for 5 stories.
And you can also see wealth in the height of the building. The Hague is most famous for that (as they say you come from clay or from sand), poor areas were build on clay -> low buildings. Rich areas were build on sand, high ceiling heavy buildings. Living on sand was/is healthier also, another reason why the rich flocked there.
Smaller plots of land, also. UK family homes (at least until the 70s or so) tend to have large gardens, Dutch seem to have less private outdoor space but put more effort into making the street-scene nice in residential areas, which UK is terrible at.
On the flip-side, the Dutch attitude to their countryside (or let's say, non urban land) is pretty brutal outside of the national parks. There's not the fetishization of "country" living that you get in the UK.
That's what surprised me too. I think it might be because for every big, dense Dutch city there are n farmhouses in Friesland, Groningen, etc. Also I'm not sure whether they categorise semidetached houses as houses or flats, given how common they are in the Netherlands the 21% would be no surprise if they're considered houses.
That whole graph is surprising. The differences between European countries are astonishing and would warrant a story article. Is it cultural? Or climate-related? Or some statistical quirk? So weird.
Americans have a very skweed view of what apartment living is actually like, in part because the construction of such buildings in America (outside of the ultra-luxury market) is generally terrible.
Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
Anyway, a lot of apartments in the US are what's called 5-over-1 construction. That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Live in a decently built apartment and it's a completely different world. Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls). Any pre-war apartments in NYC are generally amazing.
It's also worth pointing out that complaining about noise and wanting things to be quiet isn't universal. Whenever you hear such complaints, make a mental note of their demographics and see what patterns you notice.
Spaniard living in the US here. I grew up in apartment complexes and don’t ever remember worrying about noise. I think there’s definitely a component of just being used to it. Agree with your point on construction materials in the US, in relation to noise levels: the only time in my life that I was bothered by my loud neighbors was when I lived in a multi-family home unit in San Mateo, CA. It was a 4-unit home and I could literally hear all my neighbors whereabouts 24/7.
You have a very incorrect build of what modern American construction is like. Yes it is mostly timer-framed, but we have fire codes which means walls are not as thin as you seem to think. Sure if you look at an apartment built in 1950 your summary is valid, but that isn't done anymore.
5 over 1 refers to section 1 and section 5 of the building code and not the number of floors built for each. It is coincidence that with section 5, five floors is about the max you can have - but that is an about (sometimes 4 is all, sometimes you can get 6 - see a proper civil engineer for details). Section 1 is a lot more expensive to build, but it is also higher strength (and other features that make is useful for a parking garage)
5-over-1, 5-over-2, 4-over-1, and 3-over-1 are all often used terminology and they're referring to the number of floors in a podium-constructed building, not different sections of IBC. All of these podium construction styles are a product of section 510.2 of the IBC which allows for these to be treated as two separate buildings for fire purposes.
The use of masonry is limited by the requirements to withstand severe earthquakes, which are endemic throughout much of the US. I’ve lived in apartments that were effectively soundproof but those were legacy buildings where the interior concrete and masonry walls were not engineered to withstand earthquakes. It is pretty expensive to build apartments that are soundproof and can survive a magnitude 8+ earthquake. You can’t just throw building mass at the problem as is so common in Europe. Buildings need to have a lot of elastic flex to them.
It's not "cheap and shitty", it's sustainable (unlike concrete), flexible (I can modify walls easily) and with good sound proofing quieter than concrete.
I lived in a 100+ year old wood framed apartment building. The lifespan of concrete in most climate would mean that building would abandoned and too expensive to repair.
>Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
I like dumping on American housing standards, but this is completely wrong. Modern US timber framing has fairly thick walls filled with insulation. Some crappy apartments of course skimp on the insulation and you can hear the neighbors, but properly-constructed apartments are quite quiet, because of the insulation between units. In a single-family house, properly-made ones have low-grade noise insulation ("low grade" meaning it has a lower R-value than exterior insulation, because you don't need it between rooms) in the walls between rooms, so kids don't have to hear their parents screwing. "Only a plank between floors"? Please.
>That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Yeah, try actually spending some time in any decently-constructed modern apartment like this. They're not noisy at all.
Say what you want about the earthquake or fire resistance of buildings like this, but noise is not the problem you think it is.
>Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls).
If they have cheap walls, they're going to have the noise problems you're complaining about. Cheap walls = drywall (on lightweight steel studs) with little or no insulation.
Noise is almost entirely a function of how well insulated the walls in a building are between units, except in places where the units are completely separated by solid concrete. It doesn't matter if it's wood-framed or steel-framed.
Disagree. Sounds in a concrete building can travel a very long way. Someone drilling into a wall or dropping something on the floor can be heard from several floors away. Timber construction usually limits sounds from neighboring units. And when it's well constructed with noise insulation, you don't even hear neighbors.
I wonder if Barcelona's "ventilation-oriented" architecture from the cholera period had a measurable effect on the spread of covid. Of course the article itself notes that a lot of the architecture was "speculative", and that modern-day Barcelona is very densely populated, but still.
IIRC Spain was also one of the first countries during the pandemic to publish research on the importance of keeping rooms well-ventilated, so now I'm wondering if there is a connection to history there (meaning: more likely to look at the importance of ventilation due to cultural history).
Keep in mind Barcelona and Madrid are some of the densest cities in the whole Europe. It's one of the reasons why COVID took such a big hit at the beginning of the pandemic.
Barcelona is pretty aerial though. I’ve been there twice in my life and I’m very impressed by its original urbanism. At first sight by looking at a map it looks really American inspired but once you dig a little, it’s in fact a unique "modular" urbanism (of course I’m not talking about the historical city center, that’s another interesting topic).
What amazed me is how that city manages to be so densely populated but is designed so you never feel packed. My only "complaint" would be that there could be more trees but there were still more than in most French cities (which I’m from) so …
Excellent storytelling, fluidly integrating geospatial data and other visual elements and statistics in a smooth flow.
Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.
The New York Times regularly have this flowing style of stories. It is often quite impressive. Once they did a simple flowless scroll type of story called 78 long minutes, about a scared police force during a school shooting. Very impressive, you keep thinking do something! while reading and scrolling.
I wonder how many of these building types would be legal in the US just due to fire codes that were created for a different area. In most of the US apartment buildings units must have access to two stairwells which in essence limits everything to a double-loaded hallway layout. That makes it harder to build units for families and makes it impossible to have more windows and a cross-breeze. More complete discussion: https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-build-more-family-size...
I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.
I don't have a large enough sample to make a statement, but my impression is apartments in Spain are larger than in the US. Even if you want to live in an apartment, if you want more space you are forced to buy a house. You can't get a 4 bedroom apartment (3 kids? separate office? hobby room?...) You can't get an apartment with two "living rooms" (music room, tv room, rec room...). You don't need any of that, but if you are not poor you may want those things and be willing to pay if it was available.
One of the major problems with apartment living here in Sydney (or Melbourne) is the lack of 3 bedroom apartments - there just isn’t any. So once you have a family you either stay in a 2 bedroom (most of which are pretty small) or move miles out to the outer suburbs which have zero amenities and commute for over an hour each way.
Not sure about Spain, but in Italy, you definitely find a lot of 'family size' flats. We had a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom flat in a 6-plex, and that is a pretty common sort of living arrangement.
What's the area of those flats? Where I live there are plenty of 3 bedroom flats, but they are usually under 100 m^2 (often smaller) and almost always under 150 m^2.
I live in Spain in a 85m2 [1] and it isn't cramped in term of room sizes. In fact my 2 daughters decided to live in the same bedroom which meant I could convert one to an office since I am working remotely. Having said that 100m2 would give us access to a second bathroom which would be nice considering there are 3 girls living in the same place. 150m2 would be overkill for 3 bedrooms, I guess it would be more a space for 4 bedrooms or 3 bedroom and a dedicated office.
[1] caveat is it is not an appartment but a townhouse with a commercial space in the main floor. It give me exclusive use to another 85m2 rooftop space with a washing machine there so I don't have to dry clothes in the living room + exclusive use of the stairway where I store our 8 bicycles and the standup paddle. But I would say that if I didn't have those extra space I would just not have so many bicycles and things and would hang the clothes to dry hanging at the windows like everybody does.
There's plenty of 150/200/250 m^2 flats in Italy (Rome and Milan especially), but they are very expensive.
Here's a non comprehensive list of actual apartments above 250m (I didn't filter by flat, but you can see plenty are) and this is only the core center of Rome (what would you call downtown), not the entire city.
Is 100m^2 really considered cramp for a 3 bedroom? Admittedly I'm from the uk which is famed for our small home sizes. But I've been looking at 2 or 3 beds recently and anything over 80m^2 felt huge.
100 sq meters is about 1000 sq ft, and that's definitely on the small side for a 3 bedroom. 150 at 1600 is much more "normal" even in the US (for apartments, houses are usually bigger now).
Yeah, in Spain "apartamentos" refers to smaller flats; since most of the population lives in flats there's a much wider array of sizes to choose from. The typical middle class family-sized flat is about 80-120 m2, 900-1300 sqft.
A bit ironic how the first example is of La Coruña and literally everyone from there absolutely hates the fact that the ugly brutalist Franco-era flats absolutely destroyed the vibe of the coastal cities in Galicia (e.g. Cayon, O Grove, Baiona, etc.). My sister lives in Santiago de Compostela and her in-laws are from the area so I've had a lot of conversations with them.
I live in a high rise condo now, love that basically everything I need is one elevator trip away. Grocery delivers in under 15 minutes, like a charm. Maintenance takes me one hour a month, mostly changing various filters. Building is of higher quality so no noise issues. No steps to climb. But I'm a lazy retiree. For young people with children and dogs math is different.
I find the ideal building height to be up to 6 floors at most - anything more makes the streets start to feel a bit too claustrophobic and the area less "neighborly".
Building comfort is really a function of height divided by roadway width and surrounding open space. What makes a single lane road claustrophobic might be light and airy on a six or eight lane road. Central Park is surrounded by skyscrapers but is plenty airy.
There are also strategies, like setbacks, to make the building massing less imposing and obvious to the person at street level, who at the end of the day is walking with their head straight, not craning up to the sky.
Yeah, places like Pudong, Shanghai really drive this home. Pudong felt very open and airy to me when I was there last in 2009 because there is so much space between the buildings. That said, it of course felt somewhat sterile and didn't have the awesome qualities you by contrast get from the cool parts of Tokyo that have much lower buildings, but right next to each other and allow every building to be different, have businesses on random floors etc.
~6 floors is sometimes referred to as the goldilocks zone of building density. Treehugger has some good articles on it [1]. Horizontal navigation is much easier than vertical navigation (gravity and all that). Having a bunch of ~6 floor buildings next to each other makes for great walkability, while still allowing for ample daylight (and trees and whatnot), without attracing the windy conditions of all towers.
>Horizontal navigation is much easier than vertical navigation (gravity and all that).
Vertical navigation should be easier, at least for going down. All you have to do is jump...
If they could just come up with a safe and reliable way of getting people from the top of a tall building to the bottom quickly, taller buildings would be easier. Perhaps a spiral slide?
Faster elevators would be nice too. If they allowed up to, say, 3gs of acceleration, we could move between floors of tall buildings much more quickly. "Going up. Brace yourself!"
One should not discount the impact of climate/weather on the style of construction. Buildings enclosing gardens or a common area open to sunlight in an internal square is a great idea in moderate climates, but would work poorly in heavy snow regions.
I'm currently in a building from 1990 in Eastern Europe which apparently was inspired by those in Barcelona, because it's the same shape and we have a common area with greenery and trees, but the latitude is 51° N and we used to have -30°C winters as recently as the late 90s, so I wouldn't call the climate (at least back then) moderate.
In Spain, most of those socialized residential housing projects were not designed with quality of life in mind. Instead, they are more in line with France's post-war operational urban planning approach mainly designed to maximize how many lower-class people could be stored in small areas. They might place a roof over your head, but apartments are extremely small with extremely small rooms, quality of life is very poor, and zoning didn't even allowed any type of non-residential use. Some neighborhoods are outright designed after prison blocks. In contrast, the middle/upper middle class residential areas often come in the form of locked up apartment blocks manned by one or more "conserges" (like a mix between a janitor and private security guard) with the ground and first floor completely locked up.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of post-war urban planning in France. In particular, the "HLMs" of the 60's and 70's are known for their explicit interest in providing for quality-of-life in communal living. What happened instead is that these utopian plans didn't survive contact with reality.
It really isnt that bad. I lived in an apartment building in Bozeman, MT for 3 years that had an enclosed courtyard. It was pretty small and didnt get a huge amount of use anyway, so it isnt the best comparison, but overall people just sorta make do if they want to use it.
You grab a shovel and clear out a bit of snow in front of the doorway to it, and then do whatever you want outside in the snow. Snowball fights, build snowmen, even bring out a bbq if you want.
I could see how people would imagine that things like this wouldnt work well in a wintery climate, but overall Ive found that people just make do. They live with snow everywhere else outside, so why wouldnt they do the same in a courtyard?
Great analysis. I wonder if Spanish town planners have different powers than we do in the US. Town layouts are generally historical, you get to today by the sum of decisions potentially made decades or centuries or even millennia ago. It's very difficult to change a town layout drastically.
Powers are comparable, but people’s expectations are dramatically different for many reasons:
* Climate: a shaded courtyard is pretty much necessary given the weather, for instance;
* History: not only most city centers in Spain were built in the Middle Ages, but they were also built in the Arabic tradition of having fountains, slated blinds;
* Economic: Spain grew economically a bit later than the US and the rest of Europe: 1980 rather than 1960, they had a similar wave of car adoption, but a decade after rebuilding the country after the Spanish war.
* Ecology: most of the country is pretty arid: there are beautiful vistas, but it’s not the place where one wants to stay out, baking in the sun, as much.
Spaniards want to be outside, but not in a sea of green grass. They much prefer a table in the shade.
>Spaniards want to be outside, but not in a sea of green grass. They much prefer a table in the shade.
If you want to talk about Spain, you need to live in Spain ALL YEAR long, not just the summer.
Almost the entire country but the north(in the north it rains in summer) is arid in Summer, because of the Azores' anticyclone, three or two months, depending on the place, but the rest of the year it rains.
Also the arid place is Murcia and Almería, some part of Alicante and Monegros. There is a lot of rain in Extremadura, or places near the Ocean, like Galicia, Asturias, Pirineos, Huelva.
In august you are going to see anything yellow, but it gets green in Autumn, Winter and Spring.
That is, 9 to 10 months a year it rains. There is sun too and it is a good thing because it is cold, specially inside. Madrid is very sunny and cold in Winter so the sun is great.
I was born in Spain, I live and work in Central Europe but I go to Spain in the Winter as it is a much better Winter there. In Central Europe anything is burned by the cold and then you have snow everywhere.
So it is actually much more green Spain in Winter than in most of Europe.
No, Spain it's basically an elevated plateau (> 600m!) surrounded by mountain sierras everywhere. Thus, you can have bipolar climates in the Castilles, (both scorching Summers and ice-freezing Winters), more rain than the UK in the North (really), sun and touristy places at the Mediterranean zones, and microclimates all over the place.
I love sites like this! Instead of reading them, it's an instant switch to code view and looking through their javascript libraries. It's built on scrollama and d3. Excellent implementation with very smooth scroll behavior... at least on desktop.
Very nice visualization, bit slow animations but overall it was informative and looked well!
It seems they're getting the data from the catastral (official goverment data), I wonder how accurate this is? Not sure how it is in other cities around in Spain, but in Barcelona there are a ton of illegal atticos and other addons to buildings, which would add more height to the building in real life compared to the visualization.
After a quick look, I could see at least two buildings I know are taller than what the visualization says (the building next door is the same height in the visualization, but has one more floor when you see the building in real-life).
I lived in Spain for 2.5 years. I have to say, the appartment life there was fantastic. I'm back home living in the 'burbs and I still miss the "15 minute city" keenly.
I know the status-quo in Spain, but the history presented here is kinda fascinating. I keep forgetting how dynamic these things are. Also... is anyone else shocked how little development there is currently? Maybe this is just because it doesn't have e.g. 2010-2023 numbers (the downturn _was_ extremely brutal) but I thought the development sector had rebounded at least somewhat.
The downturn was brutal, but the drop in development was also needed.
At the height of the property bubble around 2005-2007, Spain (pop ~44M) was building more units per year than Germany, France and the UK (combined pop. ~195M).[1]
During the GFC Spain suffered from population shrinkage [2], surfeit of available housing stock, and the economic crunch pushed into the market some of the housing stock that would previously have been kept in reserve, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that building activities slowed down.
[1] I don't have a source, because I learnt this from a bunch of attendees to a conference on concrete (yes, the kind you use for building) in Madrid in 2007. We exchanged impressions on how software conferences (PyCon forever!) are different from the ones in the building industry, and they shared some eye opening statistics.
The site is beautiful, and yet I ask myself questions like:
What is the hydrological impact of urbanization?
This can both impact hydrological cycles (see millan millan's papers "greening and browning in a climate change hotspot") and possibly subsurface in karst and aquifer life
Don't forget when asking this question that a higher city is less wide (probably) and so while it affects the area it covers more, there is less area affected at all.
I wish that more inner city housing was high rise apartment buildings in the UK.
When I first moved here it was super weird to see "okay in London there are small flats, because it's the big city, they don't build up because they complain it ruins the aesthetic/NIMBY/Grenfell tower fears".
So I go out to a small town here for the first time. Large green fields surrounding this town, plenty of space. It's STILL ALL SMALL FLATS!
I think the core issue is that there's such a long history here, everyone already owned all the land a long time ago. Getting a small slice enough for a flat is the most people can do.
My friend grew up in London in a flat, went to inner city schools and coming from beautiful green NZ I just couldn't imagine what that must be like. His flat all surrounded by concrete and endless streets flat up against flat with no space in between. His schools all built up in the same way, often with a school field "down the road".
I think in the UK it's too late to remedy, but outside of cities houses need more space. Inside cities they need to start building modern high rises.
Outstanding—compelling presentation loaded with data.
Perhaps the conclusion should be that the world should move to efficient 75% or so apartment living. UK at 15% is a huge outlier for a top 10 economy.
It's funny how everyone complains about other people being loud when living in flats. Does no one here like to bang on electric guitar or blast karaoke with friends until 3AM?
No? I think it's rude to be excessively loud so I don't, especially not at night. I don't see this as really any different than "Does no one here cut in line?".
I'm saying that many people dislike flats because their neighbours make noise, but not many people are saying they dislike flats because they themselves wish to make noise (which they can only politely do in a house).
As a Spaniard who has lived in California for the last five years, this is what I miss most about being back in Spain. However, the ability to go without using a car unless I'm leaving the city—managing a month or more on just my bike and feet—definitely makes up for it.
R, Rstudio, QGIS and Tippecanoe for data compiling and data analysis. D3.js and Javascript for data visualization. Mapbox for mapping buildings footprint. HTML, Javascript and Scrollama for scroll webpage
maybe off topic but home ownership is one good and common way to build generational wealth (opinions/citations below) but renting or lease-holding does not realize as an asset which retains its value to be passed to children. (leases can be traded, i suppose, but have a landlord and possibility of termination). But how is generational wealth and social mobility improved or hindered by multi occupancy, high-rise living and city planning such as talked about here?
It's an interesting question. Generational wealth only matters if some are able to do it while others are not. In other words, the only thing that really matters is inequality. I'd rather totally get rid of generational wealth (ie. inheritance) and have everyone start from the same place (or perhaps an adjusted position to compensate for other factors).
Spain has lower inequality than the UK and a lot lower than the US. Inequality in the US is rising, but inequality in Spain appears to be rising rapidly. This might be because those buildings are owned by private entities who are building generational wealth.
Condos are an option to have high(er)-density and own. That said, I question if things we need for our fundamental needs are the vehicle we should chose to build inter-generational wealth. Getting prices of things we must have down, rather than up seems healthier.
Great point, imagine learning about Roman history and some 3d models of the Roman cities pops up.
Work environment have changed so much in the latest years and I feel school remained the same. Last week a young family member asked what does excel do? and she's about to enter college, and we're talking about Ireland that it supposed to have a good school system
I dream of a world where, given the data set, such a presentation would be straightforward to create with standard office software, or from a few interoperable ubiquitous software components, and easy to safely share online and offline, in a format that could be assumed to still work without issues 20 years later.
As someone up in the dark pre-wintery Sweden, it would have been awesome with some floating photos of each neighborhood too, to convey the feel of each a bit better.
The 3D maps were initially very impressive, but photos would have made the various housing forms come to life even more, at least for me.
I agree it would have been more immersive but I believe real photos would distract from the information they were conveying; their use of color coded building shapes was an easy way for me to follow along with the points their graphs were making. This presentation made me feel like I was walking into a dark corridor of a new science museum and feeling captivation
It is true. One of the things that stroke me the most when I first visited England is that, at least in Hove and Brighton and Eastbourne, all streets had houses, no flats at all.
Tbf, some of those houses have been turned into as many as half a dozen small studio flats (worth as much as proper houses in some other UK cities - Brighton is expensive)
Isn't there an optimum of about 8-12 stories for any sort of building, before the cross section of plumbing and elevator shafts make it less economical?
There are lots of different factors the come into play as you go higher.
Above 3 floors you need elevators for the disabled, while shorter buildings often cant get by without. (check with a lawyer for what your local law says - I've been told that the 3 floor isn't what the ADA doesn't actually say the highest is, just what most consider it to say). Even without disability laws, people generally want elevators to go higher.
Conventional wood framing is the cheapest, but 5 is about the max floors you can get. Brick framing can apparently get you to about 10 floors. There are lots of other construction methods - check with a proper civil engineer for what the limits and costs of each are.
Somewhere around 6-15 floors your city water will no longer have enough pressure and so your building will need booster pumps. Similarly, drain water needs special care to ensure the falling water doesn't burst the plumbing.
You local fire may code allow for less strict standards if the fire department ladder trucks can just drive up to each window and rescue someone in a burning building. If that cannot happen people need to get down the stairs in case of fire (I've always wondering how the disabled will do this) so you need to ensure those stairs can be used in case of fire.
Floor space per person is also a factor. Richer people tend to be willing to pay for more space than poor people, and poor people tend to have more kids. Thus if you make larger apartments you don't need as much elevator space. This one is tricky though as rich people tend to prefer newer buildings so you might discover that when the building gets old you can't rent some apartments because of the building max occupancy. Still, office buildings tend to have a lot more people per area, and they are more likely to leave at the same time, so I don't think space per person can be a big factor. (but school dorms need to consider all students going to class at the same time)
As the person paying for a building you get to optimize those factors (generally for profit, but you can pick other considerations). Good luck.
The optimum is based on land value, clearly, because in places where the land is effectively free or incredibly low cost, buildings don't seem to naturally get above 2 or 3 stories.
So somewhere between 3 and 12 stories is a local optimum, and it's probably about where you need additional "machine floors".
Where land is free 5 floors is the optimum just because nobody will accept more than 3 without expensive elevators (it may not even be legal if you would accept it!). Most people are willing to pay a little bit more for a larger foundation just for less floors.
For car oriented locations 1 floor is optimal because the type of building that can handle more than one level of cars is so expensive you want to just build a large parking lot. (In theory the humans could be in taller buildings, but the space used for humans becomes a rounding error, and so you may as well avoid the expensive elevator)
One of the worst things about new development in post-socialist urban areas (high density vertical) are lack of public and green spaces in neighbourhoods.
Socialist housing has schools and kindergardens on large plots of land, lots of kids playgrounds between houses, a small park here and there. "Microraion" planning deprioritizes public road so every apartment house is a part of a superblock a-la Barcelona.
The downside is often that places of commerce are lacking. They have to be built separately or have first floors repurposed for commerce. I've heard that capital city of Brasilia had this problem too.
Precisely. Yugoslavia had plenty of commercial places planned. So much so that even today many of these commercial spaces remain empty. A good example of what I mean is 'New Belgrade' in Belgrade and 'Split 3' in Split.
I'm okay with these high rises so I can enjoy the quiet tranquility of rural Spain. Everytime we do stay in an apartment in Spain the lack of sound proofing really stands out. Perhaps even more so because everything is tiled, no carpets.
I live in northern ireland in an actual house and the walls are thin enough I could dip my bread into my neighbours' soup.
It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.
I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.
Point being that it depends.
Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.
Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.
Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.
The problem is that while the shape of single-family home suburbs are meticulously controlled (e.g. minimum width between each house, minimum width from the street to your home), the world of apartments are conversely very lightly regulated. California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard. I live in a multi-family unit where the HOA meticulously controls R-value of the units and puts up a huge process/review phase when changing any flooring material, but the end result is that unless kids are screaming at the top of their lungs we hear nothing. We've held karaoke parties past midnight and our neighbors have heard nothing (we've asked.)
In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.
> California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard.
Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.
Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.
I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.
A lot of units use 1/2 inch or in many cases less. Upgrading to 5/8" makes a big difference, and installing another 1/2" on top of that gives impressive noise dampening via additional mass. As does fiberglass insulation, and filling gaps around the edges. If you don't have to meet firewall code for certain walls, you can go a lot thinner and noise reduction goes down dramatically. We had an apartment that was converted from condos and noise dampening was significant. Noise was a major consideration (closely after neighborhood) when doing selection.
There's often not much insulation requirement between units because the entire building envelope is what carries the main insulation, so it's builder's choice if they want to noise insulate above and beyond the firewall requirements.
The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.
Just a tip for anyone dealing with noise in a multi-tenant situation. Get yourself a white noise machine. It's a life changer. I thought I was going to murder my neighbor with his own leaf blower until I got it.
The most important thing is that it be 'non looping'. I hated white noise until I ponied up for a machine that generated non looping white noise. My mind would automatically latch on to any repetition.
Having stayed in Norwegian houses many times, I can attest they've really sorted their insulation out. Similarily my Swedish sister-in-law always complains about British houses when she visits, saying their cold and draughty
British houses have a worldwide reputation of bad insulation. They live in a mild climate where you don't need to heat the entire house to ensure the pipes don't freeze, and don't really need much AC to be livable in the summer. As such it is really common for people who live there to only heat the room they are in.
Nonsense. Most of the 19th century buildings are perfectly ordinary brick terraced houses and the later ones have cavity walls. I lived in one built in 1890 in Southampton for four years. Solid house but not of any kind of historical importance. They can be insulated by blowing fibre into the cavity or filling it with expanding foam..
It also depends on a neighbor. I heard my previous downstair neighbors only when they had guests. Now, there’s a single person who is a god damn elephant. They way she always stomps and throws things on the floor…
> even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.
My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.
It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.
Not disagreeing with your point but I’d like to support what the op said regarding “modern” buildings often having excellent sound deadening. My previous Dutch residence also had those “fake” (non concrete) walls but I couldn’t hear others in their rooms even when they played loud music (and they had different nationalities). But if no effort goes into soundproofing, it can be unsurprisingly pretty bad.
Yeah, before living where I live now, I lived for a while in an building from the late 1800s. The smaller units were of course added cheaply in modern times, and didn't align well with how it was originally built.
One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.
I lived in a relatively old apartment block in Austria. Only time I heard my neighbours was when they did drilling. The sound outside echo'd a lot so I could hear things in the courtyard (3 floors down) and people in nearby blocks louder than my neighbours.
I live in northern Nevada in an exurb. I go for a walk everyday that requires me to go on a road for half a mile before I get to the dirt path. On that half mile road the traffic is so constant and so loud (from my small gated community) I can’t hear whatever I’m listening to on my headphones. The clamor is so aggravating I’m usually a bit angry by the time I hit the dirt path. My exurb neighbors (multiple) have loud grinding ACs and they run them all night. I can’t leave my windows open while I sleep even when it’s in the 50s outside, because of their grinding noise.
I recently walked about 20 miles back in SF again. It was comparatively pleasant. Road traffic was slower. The materials they use to make the roads reflect less of the sound than here in Nevada. I wasn’t triggered by vehicles or traffic or trucks. I stayed in the Panhandle and could sleep with the bedroom window open.
There’s a way to make heaven or hell in both cities and rural areas.
If he's from reno he probably works at tesla. NV has no state income tax which lures a lot of people. The AC-at-night gripe seems off to me, you only need AC in northern nevada about 3 months of the year (they could be heat pumps for the 50F overnight lows). Reno changed a lot in the last 8 years, mostly for the worse. A lot of people who bring their big-city aggression and driving style to a medium-size town that has no infrastructure to support it. A lot of people ended up there against their will due to all the crazy covid-era migrations.
I live in an apartment in Dublin -- noise is not a problem for me. I'll concede there is a bias in Ireland against apartments. I suspect it's because of the perception that 'flats' are either like the Ballymun flats or Luxury apartments no one can afford with little room in between.
It's a real shame this bias exists in Ireland it really does little to help the housing crisis or the egregious amount of one off housing in rural Ireland does little to help infrastructure connections.
Just to chime in on apartment living in Dublin. There was a period during the late 80s and 90s when awful apartments were built in dublin (private buildings as well as social housing). Really bad sound insulation, build quality and design. They had mold problems, were poorly ventilated always too hot or too cold and were extremely grim. Even thinking about them now grims me out.
This really poisoned the well in Ireland towards apartment living.
Me too! Do you ever hear music from neighbors that goes on for hours? But the problem is, it’s not so loud that they’re having a party and you can complain. No, it’s just loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to record or for others to easily hear.
I had one set of neighbors who fell into this range for about a year. I suspect their place was sparse, I could even hear them push their chair out from dining table. I felt happy when they moved out!
I want to second this. Living in flats sounds cute for most of the people who never lived in ones that are being built with cheap materials and thin walls. It's all nice and dandy until a sill neighbour moves in and then you've got nowhere to hide.
Living in a poorly built flat is a bad experience, sure, but there are well built flats out there, where you can only hear your neighbors if they're actually being loud--really not that big a problem.
I live in Finland in a modern apartment building. Walls have good sound insulation, and triple pane windows insulate for both heat and sound. I am next to a busy road, but can not hear it inside, unless I open some windows.
Same. I try to rent exclusively on the top-floor (next to impossible in a big city) because of a memorable experience I had with a an overweight upstairs neighbor who favored jumping jacks as his primary form of exercise.
I have lived/stayed in places in the middle of dense urban areas where you essentially never hear anything (occasionally sirens if the windows are open, that sort of thing), and others where you can tell when your neighbor is stirring tea.
One of the factors is cost, yes, but also age of the building and materials/techniques matter. I suppose it also matters if any of your neighbors are 23 and like powerful stereos - but that holds pretty much anywhere that isn't very rural.
Oh, and in dense urban/busy areas, height matters too. Living on the first 5 floors is far different than say 15+, in terms of how much street noise etc. you will hear with an open window (or even without).
Construction methods and quality vary a lot. Older concrete and brick multistory apartment buildings generally have excellent soundproofing. Wooden apartment buildings, like five-over-one or 3-4 story all wood apartment buildings, not so much. Low rise wooden hotels, built as cheaply as possible, are at the lower limit of “I can know exactly what my neighbours are doing if I pay attention”.
I lived in flats in the New Town of Edinburgh (i.e. fairly old buildings) for ~30 years and never heard a sound from neighbours - probably because the walls appeared to be ~1m thick sandstone!
I've lived in 3 flats across New Town and Stockbridge and every flat was horrible. I could hear the footsteps of people upstairs. Most flats have floorboards and they are not kind to the neighbors below. I'm not living in a flat ever again.
I lived in the Leith colonies for twenty years, and while I never heard my neighbours from above, or the sides, I would always hear people running up and down the stairwell, and the maindoor slamming shut.
I’ve lived in multiple modern apartments and never heard my neighbors. One time I did hear someone playing music loudly, but my watch measured it at 35dB
was gonna comment the same :melting face: I'm an armchair urbanist and all about density, and in well built buildings it's fine, even with tiled floors you can't really hear your neighbors
but in Spain it's as if the buildings are built with zero soundproofing - you hear every single neighbor in the whole building and their tvs, radios, conversations, footsteps... it's maddening, I don't understand it
The Spanish just don’t seem to care about noise at the institutional level. I spent a week in a small Spanish city last year & the local rubbish collection went down the street outside the door, pouring bins full of bottles from the local bars in the back at midnight. Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.
Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.
I am living in south of spain and not only spanish do not care about hearing noise, I think they actually do like being noisy and hearing noise. They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example. At the beginning I almost felt I should have interrupted couples in the middle of their conversations. I thought they were arguing and were about to become physical against each other, shouting mere inches from each other face with arms throwing all over the place. But no, you quickly realize they are just talking about trivial things, agreeing on something or just complaining about something external.
I am living in Andalucía (originally US) and have had the _exact_ same experience. I have gotten used to it...except for when my upstairs neighbors decide to make a glorious racket every night at exactly midnight, right when I'm trying to sleep.
> They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example.
That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.
> Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep.
I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.
This was midweek in the autumn after the bars had all shut & everyone had gone home. It might even have been a bit later! Either way, my point is that it was the worst possible time to be upending bins full of glassware in a residential area. That noise was far louder than the people in the bars had been an hour earlier.
The actual truck that collect those glasses pass between 2 to 4am. What does it do? It lift the glass collection tank and let the glass fall into the truck bed. So yes I don't think anyone cares that someone if binning some glassware one hour before the truck will do that same noise at much higher scale.
I was referring to the truck here, not the individual bars putting their bins out. They closed relatively early for Spain, as it was mid-week & not high-summer.
The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...
I can confirm this. I am from Spain and I have lived in a few cities all around the country and the lack of soundproofing in every building is a common thing, regardless of town or area, it seems like all buildings from 1970 were built ignoring any sound proof.
The Spanish love the noise is my theory. They are a very social people. They probably think of it as comforting versus annoying, and like the person that lives next to the waterfall that can't hear it, it probably fades into the background of their consciousness.
Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!
And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D
Each American men bears a hat with mouse ears and every American woman is dressed as Cinderella. They hear Disney music all the time while letting children to take selfies with them. Is a very strange place.
Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.
Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.
Is true that Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands care less about proper insulation. The north and center is different.
Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it.
It just happens that big cities, sport events, drinking areas and heavy traffic streets are noisy places. Here and in Australia. If you go where the drunkards join; expect to meet a lot of drunkards. But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
> But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.
Noise is the largest complaint my spouse has with dense buildings. I tune things out easily, but I also found myself self conscious about walking softly when I lived above people.
Me too. What's annoying is it seems hard to tell what it's going to be like before you actually move in.
I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.
In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.
In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.
I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.
But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.
This is my theory with respect to hearing voices from downstairs. It only takes the tiniest little air gap to make a huge difference and I can tell there is one somewhere.
I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.
Noise is not the biggest problem: Cheap apartment buildings from the 60s and 70s has such thin walls what they have no thermal isolation whatsoever. In poor neighborhoods you will see air conditioner machines everywhere because there is no other way to keep the flats livable.
As someone who grew up in a commie block, I think density over a certain point just sucks.
Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.
I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.
Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.
I live in Malmö on the southern edge of Sweden opposite Copenhagen, it's quieter here (pop: 350,000~) than my friends home village in Northamptonshire (Thrapston; pop: 6,239 as of 2011).
This was largely because of the sheer volume of cars on the road, because you essentially have to drive to get anywhere. London is similar, despite not everyone needing a car there is traffic everywhere, you can notice that there's back streets and they tend to be very quiet until there are lots and lots of people, think >200 in a 100sqm area.
Having the ability to escape noise is the most important part of noise management. Cities like London have almost no respite from the noise and thus it can be physically draining for many people to experience it. Including myself.
Cities are loud, cars are one (major) reason, but not the only one.
I lived in a downtown area in a high-rise. 2am in the morning, no cars running but the hummming of all the equipment necessary to operate a city is noise pollution.
When I live in rural low noise areas bp is 125/75 range. high noise areas bp is 155/105 range. BP drugs only drop it a little.
Unfortunately just bought a house in a rush hour high noise area. wife loved in the house, I loved the visible sky, and we both loved the yard/garden. we saw it on a Sunday (very quiet day. :) Now I have a hard time being outside or taking my scope out for observing.
Waiting for a stroke or kidney failure from the high BP.
Only badly made cities, where authorities do not care about noise, are loud. And the irony is that most of the noise comes from people living outside of the cities, bringin their cars outside in the typical egoism of the modern suburbanite and rural inhabitants.
It is like people who complain about public teansports who are usually the ones actively participating in ruining it for everyone.
It's not just authorities, it's cultural. Some cultures are simply much louder than others. I live in Tokyo and it's generally very quiet here, despite (usually older) apartments having a bad reputation for paper-thin walls. Public transit is generally whisper-quiet (as far as the riders; the trains themselves of course are not), as people generally don't talk much, and talking on the phone is prohibited. People who make too much noise will probably get the police called on them, but that only works in a society where there's a culturally low tolerance for noise, so it's not really up to the authorities.
That's fascinating! I've lived in apartments or condos most of my life and it just wasn't an issue. Possibly structural, possibly cultural - people tended to live a quiet life, unless you were unfortunate and got a real party neighbour. I live in a house right now and in some ways my life is louder (closer to the loud streets, neighbour's barking dogs and lawnmower and snowblower machines and constant little constructions etc).
One time when I was younger, my mom was talking to my grandmother on the phone, in Spanish. I could hear my grandmother on the other end too. They're both yelling. No idea what they were talking about, but I had to ask, something to the effect of, "Mom, are you angry? Why are you and grandma yelling?"
Nope, nothing was wrong. That's just how they talk to each other in Spanish. Weird. It also never occurred to me why I didn't notice until whatever age I was, a teenager in high school. It never really occurred to me that they were always 'yelling' while talking to each other until that moment.
There is the possibility that they really were upset and yelling, but my mother didn't often keep things from me (at least not as far as I know). I also noticed the yelling afterwards, so I'm confident that was me simply realizing that's how they talked after years of not noticing.
Nowhere else I have seen a conversation to constantly erupt between total strangers than in Spain. They just can't. So I can imagine that this constant involvement in the lives of others might be not a problem for them.
Dunno about Spain, but in France, a relative in a ?9 story building basically gutted their place.
Unlike North American condos, in France they own their windows and can replace them.
They also built out a “frame” to install noise insulation on top of the shared walls, losing a bit of interior space (and a huge free bonus to the neighbours). Can’t remember if they did the ceiling too.
Unfortunately, no flooring standards are an issue. In my Canadian condo, if you redo the floors, there’s some noise insulating requirement for your choice of flooring as it’s against concrete.
I feel that's why many people, especially families prefer detached homes. Sound proofing is guaranteed by the air gap. And if there is a problem with soundproofing you can solve it yourself by making changes.
Perhaps row houses are best? Good density, and with a solid concrete wall seperating units to stop sound and fire from spreading?
Spain also has the lowest fertility rate in Europe at 1.28. Not sure how much apartment living is cause or effect on that but it's a grim number. Every generation is only 60% the size of the one that came before it.
This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out? Im not sure why THAT isnt the next step, and instead we have so many whackos in government trying to force pregnancies and other wild policies. Yeah, its a hard, big, complex problem and will probably require a decade of modeling/testing like what is happening with UBI testing in small cities. Maybe its just a reflection of the times when the people we elect reach for the most insane heavy handed solutions for every problem, and proceed to publicly fill their pants at the very concept of change.
you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East).
importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.
it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.
You omit the masses of working poor immigrants that do a lot of the manual labour North Americans do not want to do -- predominantly in agriculture, construction, small manufacturing, and healthcare. They're the de-facto essential workers.
Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this is how we preserve identity. Moving to a different country is a traumatic experience when done voluntarily; imagine having to permanently leave home under duress and on short notice.
As an immigrant myself, what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display. I'd sum up my knee-jerk reaction to it as "Bro, if X is so great, why did you leave?" -- again, this is spoken as a person who left their homeland, with first-hand experience of some of the complex issues that surround all that. I still don't quite understand what drives that "flag-waving", but I hope to one day.
Having said all that, I would encourage my adoptive country to be proactive in their immigration policies. Putting it harshly, "get the good ones before they go somewhere else". The geopolitics of the world will only become more chaotic as the impacts of climate change cause hardship in the less habitable areas of the planet -- big migrations are inevitable. If you want your country to arrive in the 22nd century while preserving most of your way of life, you can't be clinging to outmoded ideas.
The idea that immigrants are a good idea because they do labour your existing population won't do is quite socially destructive and the cause of technological stagnation. It separates people into a de facto caste system where unpleasant jobs are also underpaid, prevents automation from becoming cost effective, and can block a country from reaping the benefits of skilled migration.
I didn't mean to assign a value judgement to this -- maybe I can phrase it better. It's not that the "local" people don't want to do certain jobs, it's that the capital owners are not willing to pay fair wages for labour, and then only people who are desperate enough (poor immigrants) end up doing do these jobs.
I'd love to hear some examples where this has caused technological stagnation and blocked skilled migration -- US and Canada provide solid counter-examples to these claims. Both countries take in immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum, from coveted H1B high-paying tech jobs, to seasonal farm workers who exist in slavery-like circumstances. Both countries show significant, sustained technological innovation.
I agree this is destructive to the social fabric, and it separates us into strata. But I have a hard time believing that immigration is the cause; a simpler explanation would interpret it as one of the symptoms, with the underlying causes being closely related to the relentless transfer of wealth to an ever-shrinking "elite".
The one I was thinking of was slavery in the US, and the technological innovation in the south vs the north.
A better example might be the low price of labour-intensive hand-picked fruit (particularly berries) in the US and the correspondingly low agricultural automation. It's not that machines don't exist, or that berry picking is going to prevent the next Facebook, it's that they aren't cost effective in the short to mid term even when longer term investment would eventually improve the whole industry. This is really hard to measure and I don't have any good sources for either side of the argument right now.
I also want to make a distinction between skilled and unskilled migration. I don't think skilled migration is harmful to the social fabric in an enduring way, nor migration with the same proportion of skilled and unskilled labour as the host country.
> what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display.
Also an immigrant, and I have observed that some immigrants tend to be become more conservative when they move. Or perhaps they have stopped evolving when their peers in the home country have moved on. I think this might be partly due to dealing with the trauma of displacement, and partly due to lack of diversity in thinking. I have mainly noticed this in a generation older than mine.
>you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false
I am not, i am acting like immigrating literally anybody is going to be massively better than a declining population. If they live in a country, they are paying for housing, food, and services, and almost certainly have a job. taxes on top of all of that. I think the attitude of being picky is fine and wise, right now, but eventually you are really going to just want anyone instead of going inverted.
This simply isn't true. They're not going to be paying for housing and services and having a job if they commit crimes and go to prison. Certain host countries have found that certain immigrant groups tend to have very high crime rates and cause a lot of social problems. And even if they avoid crime and have a job, extremely low-paid immigrants aren't going to be paying much in taxes under a highly progressive taxation scheme.
High-skill immigrants are almost always a big win for the host country because of the things you cite, and more (they bring innovation, start businesses, etc). Low-skill/low-education ones are a crapshoot. It's better to have an inverted population pyramid than deal with all the social ills that come from immigrants that cause too many problems.
> This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me.
Since the early days of humanity, we've relied on children taking care of us in our old age. I haven't seen a solution for that.
Nursing homes are not a solution. I listened to some grim statistics from my state recently. In many nursing homes, the ratio of staff to patients is 6:1. It takes 6 full time employees to take care of 1 patient. Now I'll grant that these numbers were outliers, because the population was challenging - many/most of these patients had dementia, etc. And they were handling rural areas - you'd get better scaling in the city. Still, I'm sure in a major metropolitan area it's at least 2:1.
And that doesn't account for the poor existence in those places (abuse by employees, abuse by fellow residents - you're screwed if you don't have family members advocating for you).
And that's for patients who get to go. Many elderly will have chronic conditions which are bad enough that you can't live alone, but generally not bad enough for Medicare or health insurance to pay for assisted living. Examples are things like mobility issues - only long term health care insurance covers this, and it's way too expensive. I don't own such a policy and likely won't ever be able to afford it.
And until we do, we need more people, as bad as it may be for the environment.
It's not as if no one thought of what you're saying. I think you don't appreciate how unfeasible it is currently. First off you have economics. Can we make it cheaply enough so that it's available to everyone, and not just white collar folks?
Even putting aside the economics of it, once you start itemizing all the possible ways one would need help, you'll realize you're effectively asking for the equivalent of an intelligent android.
“We made it terrible for our own people to make families, but don’t worry! We can keep the party going by importing loads of people due to economic forces!” Sounds so incredibly shitty.
If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.
I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families. We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
> If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.
Most of developed countries have bad fertility rate, some developing and/or poor countries have good fertility rate. People in rich countries don't have children not because they can't afford to, but because they don't want to.
You’re right, it’s not that a standard wage can’t even get you an apartment, medical care is astronomical, and the capitalists are ruining everything.
It’s that people stopped wanting kids. How silly of me. We undid all the evolutionary programming of our species to play XBox and rent.
…or it’s that the system is broken and we should cease importing people because the only people that “win” in that situation are those connected to global capital.
> You’re right, it’s not that a standard wage can’t even get you an apartment, medical care is astronomical, and the capitalists are ruining everything.
Did you somehow miss word "Spain" in the title and immediately proceeded with US-specific rant?
Additional info from Wikipedia[0]:
> As of 2020, according to the World Economic Forum and to Bloomberg, Spain has the most efficient health system in Europe, and also ranks at the top worldwide along with Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.
> Due to universal health care coverage, inequality is reduced substantially. Inequality in Spain is even further reduced in that co-payments do not usually apply, limited to special medicines and services that are not covered by the National Health System.
And yet socialist Spain has fertility rate of 1.3 compared to 1.7 of dystopian capitalist-driver privatized-healthcare-only US [1]. I'm sure everyone buying a house every year and enjoying even better health care in such countries as Niger, Chad and Somalia that somehow on top of the fertility list though.
There are no nations that currently have a both modern living and population growth, i think there are definitely some fundamental failures to make having children an attractive option in many countries like the US, but even countries that give a billion hours parental leave, tax breaks, etc. have declining populations.
your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested. which may be in our future regardless, and may be necessary at some point. but massive change on that scale only happens in response to horrifying levels of war or unpredictable changes in technology(changes on the scale of a power positive fusion revolution). You either dont want or cannot force those things.
the immigration solution is a stop-gap and still a big change for most, but one that buys nations 40+ years and is no harder than simply opening the door that millions are banging on right now, and billions will be banging on as climate disaster grows.
Personally, I think the real solution, the ultimate solution, was detailed in the 1930s book "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley: reproduction and child-rearing needs to be outsourced to the government. It's the only way for the math to work. People just don't want to have 6 kids any more, and I don't think that's going to change. (And yes, people have to have 6 kids for population growth to work, because there's always going to be people who have 1 or none, so you need plenty of high-fertility couples to make up for them. People haven't stopped having kids these days, they've just stopped having so many.)
“your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested.“
So the system we currently have, which we already agree is failing people here, but we’re worried changing the system is bad?
Why take 40 more years if it’s already failing?
Letting millions of people in is NOT GOOD for the people already here. I say we just don’t do that.
The only people benefitting are part of a global capital class and not regular workers. We were sold that it would bring worldwide peace and better living conditions. It was a lie and we know it - why continue?
> If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported
Interesting thought. The notion that GDPpopulation has to grow comes comes from that economic system. The problem is that the economic system dictates policy to such a large extend that democracy is a farce.
> I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families.
+1
> We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
Why? What's the daily life/ human problem with becoming less humans? (I know the economic GDPpopulation reason, and I know why militarily that IS very important)
I agree that immigration is a quick fix for a low fertility rate. But the people worrying about fertility rates fear cultural displacement by immigrants. They want less immigration, not more, and instead see a return to family values as the answer to the fertility rate problem.
Anyway, the problem is not the current decline in population, it is a fertility rate that remains far below a replacement rate. That means there is no bottom to the population decline. The immigration solution would need to be applied again and again.
People worrying about cultural displacement in europe need to crack open a history book and understand the movement of people is just how the world works. Its like the movement of air from different pressure areas. Most spanish people are actually a mix of moors and visigoths, other mediterranean people through history, and even celtic or germanic peoples who by and large displaced some earlier occupant of the iberian pennisula, who displaced some even earlier people, and so on and so forth until we get to whoever displaced the neanderthals. And all of this displacement involved assimilation too. Acting like migration should stop now would be like asking the wind to stop blowing or the tides to stop. Its like a natural law that people will go where theres better opportunities for them.
You're talking about the moors and visigoths in Spain, but did you forget those people integrated with the locals by invading? They weren't exactly welcomed with open arms, they just forced their way in and then took over. That's how the history of most of Europe looks, with all those examples of people displaced by newcomers. Why would any sane person want this? Just because it happened commonly in the past doesn't mean it's a good thing. In the modern world, we've mostly agreed that invading other places just because you want to live there, and want to marginalize or kill the people already living there, is no longer acceptable. Are you honestly saying you want to go back to those days?
I suspect a return to the family home values of the 90s and before, somewhere around 3x the average income, would be more effective than family values in the abstract.
> That means there is no bottom to the population decline.
The only reason I still don't have a kid is expensive housing (i.e. too many people for too little space). My partner is more or less tied to the capital because of her job and our apartment literally (and I mean literally) can't fit one more desk, much less one more person.
A population decline (with the society kept running by more automation) should make things a bit easier, shouldn't it?
> world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years)
The population of prospective immigrants who completed 12 years of education or more is already largely gone, because the fertility rates in countries with this level of development are either already below replacement or on the way to it at a rapid pace.
And you need at least that to contribute to an advanced economy.
A government’s source of revenue is working age taxpayers. Its biggest cost is the social safety net for the elderly. It seems natural for them to care about population growth? Where would they get the money for UBI if their tax base is contracting every year?
Immigrants (at the scale Spain needs) don’t want to move to a shrinking economy. Spaniards themselves are leaving the country to look for work. As an example, Central American immigrants will immigrate through multiple low growth countries specifically to get to the U.S. for work.
To GP’s point though, I think Spain’s population problems aren’t all that related to dense apartments and more tied to economic opportunities.
Living in Spain it's far easier than in the US. We already speak Spanish, and knowing the jargon from Spain it's just a matter of literal weeks.
Also, the healthcare options, the lack of violence even at night (relatively, every city has its 'bad zones' but even with that it's far safer) and the welfare state makes their lives a paradise compared to, for instance, a hell zone in the Dominican Republic or narcozones in Mexico.
give it time, they will have issues taking care of their aging population without a sufficient number of people of age that can provide economic output and care. It's a problem that eventually fixes itself but until we work through the "backlog" it will be pretty painful.
Do we have examples of this? I know these arguments, but I wonder if that will really happen. Maybe public care will shrink, but still many of the aging boom generation will afford private care, or not need much of it.
> ...pretty painful.
How will the subjected population notice that you reckon? Prices change, sure, but many of us on earth also live in a lot more luxury than 200 years ago: so we have some fat on our bones.
> population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out?
I have the same sentiment. Though I take that "reflection" means that it was the economic model we live in/under is what gave rise to the "population growth concerns".
That's part of why it's so hard to think of alternatives from within this model.
> Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out?
It's way way easier to deal with neutral/slight growth than shrinking. Like take teachers as an example. In an ideal world the demand for them is the same year in year out. Every year X of them will retire and Y new graduates will be hired. In a declining world you need 3% fewer teachers every year so when 3% retire you don't hire new ones. Multiply that across every industry and you have a youth unemployment crisis.
This concern over fertility vs immigration seems REALLY misplaced to me. The goal is not to maximise the tax revenue of an abstract entity called “country”. It’s about people, their values, their desires and their abilities to achieve them.
It’s ideology. People living in religious communities often worship fertility, and try to make breeding as widespread as possible. Blood based nationalism is obsessed with the “race” (unscientific term) not dying out. For both, having children and raising them in the same ideology is crucial for preserving their existence.
For the global liberal capitalism, the only way it can maintain its egalitarian promise is for it to rely on infinite growth. You can promise to the exploited that they will have even more people to exploit in the future if they keep their head down and stick with the status quo for long enough. It’s starting to hit external limits given by the environment, and available space only recently.
Meanwhile, some societies are aging and doing fine. The economy can be fine tuned to prioritize basic needs, and sustainably supply the people regardless of their age. For example automation in agriculture means that we’ll need less and less people to produce food. UBI is just one tool that could be useful here.
Not positioning myself here but ideology is one of those partisan despective words that have another-side-of-the-coin words (“culture” in this case, but see religion vs. cult, indoctrination vs. education, etc.). Several spanish regions are very keen on maintaining their particular culture.
> Spain also has the lowest fertility rate in Europe at 1.28. Not sure how much apartment living is cause or effect on that but it's a grim number.
Spain's economy is very screwed up. Unemployment rate tends to hover above 20% and I think it has the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education.
To top things off, cost of living in urban centers is way way above the median income, specially nowadays. Young families have to make do with either sharing apartments/renting rooms or living way outside city centers in small apartments. In some cases the only affordable option is renting rooms way outside the urban centers.
So the average Spanish couple has to make very hard decisions on if/when to start a family. Quite often the decision tends towards "not right now, we can't afford it."
Marketing brochures tend to emphasize Spain's "terraza" lifestyle, as in people hanging out in cafes/bars/restaurants in the afternoon, evening, and even night, and brag about the fantastic social life that sprouts from there, but the ugly truth is that one important factor of that pattern is the fact that housing is very expensive and very low-quality to the point that staying indoors in one of those flats can have a huge detrimental impact on your mental health, and the only way to avoid that is to minimize the amount of time you spend indoors.
> Unemployment rate tends to hover above 20% and I think it has the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education.
The first claim is true, but there's a lot of under-reported economic activity, and a lot of fraud (people claiming they don't work when they actually do), so the unemployment rate figure can't be trusted.
Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
> but there's a lot of under-reported economic activity,
I'm sorry, but that's just hand-waving over the problem to pretend it isn't there.
> Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
I learned that fact because the Spanish Government posts tv ad campaigns on how Spain has the highest rate if students dropping out of basic education, and how they should instead explore options such as pursuing trade education.
If you really are interested on the topic, you could start by checking what OECD has to say about Spain's education problem, including how 27% of its 25-34 yo cohort (i.e., the latest generation entering the workforce) did not complete basic studies and does not have postsecondary education. Spain also boasts a NEET rate of 17%.
It's also noteworthy that Spain's horeca industry started to rely on heavy influxes of immigrants from South America to meet their demand, in spite of Spain having one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.
The UN report shared by the sibling poster, has a graph that distinguishes the rates between Spanish and non-Spanish nationals, so I think that’s a positive answer to your question
Not sure if you are from the US, but apartments in the US will give you a very different idea of apartment living than you can get in other countries. Due to restrictive fire cods, US apartment either are terrible or terribly expensive. https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-build-more-family-size...
Contemporary societal culture is biased against old folks—little respect, not valued for their wisdom and experience—but the problem with more older people is higher costs for retirement, healthcare, and a smaller pool of tax payers.
Your first paragraph is most relevant. The thing about the pressie and senators is only relevant to the miniscule minority of the most powerful people.
i'm sure the oldies will figure something out and it can be assumed that societal culture will shift in their favor if demographics change towards them.
not particularly, no. while the "boomers ruined the economy" trope isn't all right, neither is it all wrong. they effectively mortgaged much of the future value of the country and extracted it.
now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.
what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.
I agree with you. Also, comparing by countries is intuitively not a good measure due to the averaging out of highs and lows. It would be absurd to compare Spain versus Alaska or Texas but these are two US states larger than Spain. How about comparing by cities? How does Madrid fare versus New York City or Chicago or Hong Kong?
I’m tempted to think that the author saw those two examples (and Monaco) as cities more than countries, which, for an analysis of urban density makes sense. That would be like excluding the Vatican from an analysis of immigration.
Population is one thing but density of people per sq km is another. For these cities people must be crammed into apartments I can't imagine that density would mean people are in single homes.
Yes, takes all sorts, and probably a lot of it comes down to what you're used to. Paradoxically I find being down the country claustrophobic; in truly rural areas (and in places with particularly poor provision for pedestrians, like most of the US, this often manifests even in outer suburbs) you can't really get anywhere without driving, and you may not be able to leave your house at all without driving (probably no footpath, narrow unsafe road).
I'd never consider living somewhere where I couldn't, at minimum, walk to supermarkets, bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
Single family homes are fine. The problem in the U.S. is that it's illegal to build anything _but_ single family homes in the majority of suburbs. Wouldn't it be better if people had access to a walkable grocery store, coffee shop or park? Or if kids could safely walk or bike to school? Many communities have absolutely zero options and are completely reliant on cars in order to go about daily life.
Most suburbs also have higher density zones where you can have apartments. The single family homes get the majority of the land space, but there are also apartments and townhouses which are more dense.
There are sometimes apartments spotted around in a suburby area, but due to the nature of US suburbs they don't really get many of the advantages density should bring - everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there, etc. Any time you leave your apartment you go straight to the parking lot and get in your car. It's pathetic really.
> everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there
Can you point at specific places like this? Google street view links?
Every suburb I've lived in the US I can walk to just about everything I need, kids walk to playground and parks, friends houses, etc.
I'm curious to see these suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.
To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me. None of the dozens of suburban US people I've known has ever found it feasible to walk to much of anything - yes, maybe a neighborhood playground if they're lucky. They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.
In the latter it _may_ be theoretically feasible to walk to a couple restaurants, if you don't mind a fairly unpleasant trip. In practice I guarantee you almost no one does this.
But those are just a couple arbitrary choices; in my experience they're pretty much all like that.
On the other hand, by being selective about where I live (walkable neighborhoods are scarce in the US), I've been able to live in several places where a great grocery store, a gym, multiple great restaurants, a bar or two, and other interesting destinations were within a 5 minute walk - in some cases literally right next door. If most of the land around you is taken up by single family homes with pointlessly large lots, it's completely infeasible for anything more than a tiny percentage of people to live close to these things, short of building a grocery store for every 100 people or something absurd.
> To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me.
Same, but that's why I say the US is a big place. There isn't a standard US suburb.
> They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.
That is alien to my experience. I can walk to all of those, with multiple instances of each one, from a suburban SFH.
On the first link near Charlotte, I have two comments: First one is that it stretches the definition of suburb. Switch to satellite view and zoom out until you see Charlotte. Those houses are in the midst of vast stretches of green, far away from the nearest urban area (Charlotte) a half hour away. That seems semi-rural to me. Are we calling that a suburb?
Even so, there is a supermarket, gym, tavern and a few other stores within 1 mile. A very easy bike ride.
The second link is definitely suburban, smack in the middle of built-up areas. Also more familiar to me since I have lived in various spots not far from there. You can easily walk to Saratoga Ave which is full of businesses.
So there's a pretty big push for urbanism the last few years. There's lots of YouTube channels and other social media stuff dedicated to the idea that the US needs more walkable neighborhoods, more bike infrastructure, less car dependence, etc.
In your view then... what in the world is this about? If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism? Why does this channel https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes have over a million subscribers?
Moreover, why is the suburb such a post-automobile phenomenon? If it's viable to get everywhere from a suburb without a car, why were people in 1000 BCE or 1000 CE or 1800 CE not living in suburbs?
I just find this perspective so weird... I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
> In your view then... what in the world is this about?
I don't entirely know, that's why I ask questions and links to concrete places.
> If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism?
I think there are different reasons for wanting to live in a dense downtown.
20-something me wanted to live in Manhattan so I could walk to hundreds of bars and clubs. For young people looking for this scene, an ultra-dense downtown is the only way to go.
So that is one reason, and for this one I completely understand and agree that no suburb ever will be able to offer the same experience.
But I feel other reasons are based on misconceptions. I see it repeated in every housing thread on HN, that it is impossible to walk anywhere when living in a suburb. Just on this article discussion you can find multiple people making variants of that claim. Sometimes people here on HN go even more outlandish and claim that people in suburbs must drive 30 minutes to get to a supermarket.
Those are misconceptions, so I think it's worth pointing that out. I'm sure there are occasional suburbs (not rural) where you truly can't walk anywhere, but that seems like a rare exception.
In my very suburban neighborhood, we can easily walk to 3 supermarkets, many restaurants, two bars, misc services (haircuts, locksmiths, etc), assorted other stores, hardware store, movies, library, theater, post office, bike shops, car repair, multiple playgrounds, sports fields, friends houses (for adults and kids) and I can go on.
> I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
I don't think I can go places without a car in my suburb, I can and I do. See list above. Unless it's freezing and raining (not so common here in NorCal), I mostly walk or bike to all of the above. I prefer to bike but the lack of secure bike parking makes me walk more often than bike. My pre-teen kid can bike or scooter or walk to these places as well, mostly friends houses. I'm not imagining this, this is how we live out here in the suburbs.
The only additional point I’ll make is that places like Stallings (the first link I posted) are absolutely considered suburbs. For instance the Wikipedia article on Stallings calls it a “suburban town” ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallings,_North_Carolina ).
That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.
> That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.
It's true that there is no agreed definition to "suburb" which confuses these discussions.
Suburbs comes from sub (under, although here basically means around) urbs (city).
To me a suburb must be connected to its city. The city center has dense tall buildings and as you move away from the center the height and density decrease and then you are in the sub-urbs but it's all still built-up area. Once you move even further away and move into forested areas, you're out of the suburbs and into the rural surroundings.
If you have 30 minutes of highway driving through mostly forested areas (very green on google satellite view) between a house and the "urbs" (Charlotte, here) I think that's quite a stretch to call that a suburb.
Yeah, well that's just not the case at all here. The drive from Stallings to downtown Charlotte is almost entirely on Independence Boulevard, which is very much a stroad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad ), very much developed with lots of pointless strip malls and office parks and little visible nature, and certainly not a foresty experience. The fact that you can see green nearby on satellite view has little to do with people's actual experience driving on these roads.
Suburbs are not perfectly walkable. As a.crow flies there are things in range ,but often there are fences in the way so you can't get there. Even if you can, the door face the road and so you spend most of acceptable walking distance just getting around the building. And there are no or poor sidewalks on the trip so you end up mixing with cars too much.
I bike to the.grocery store, it isn't too far, but the trip is not pleasant because everything is setup or driving.
Those high density zones suffer economically by being forced to subsidized the extensive infrastructure for single family homes - and in the US it's quite difficult to find an area to inhabit that actually prioritizes pedestrians over cars.
> The problem in the U.S. is that it's illegal to build anything _but_ single family homes in the majority of suburbs.
This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal? All around I see townhouses, apartment buildings, 2/4/6-plexes and other variants being built, none of which are single family homes. Maybe it takes a bunch of paperwork (I don't know) but clearly it isn't illegal.
> Wouldn't it be better if people had access to a walkable grocery store, coffee shop or park? Or if kids could safely walk or bike to school?
This is a false dichotomy. One can also live in a SFH and walk/bike to all of these things and more. I do, and I do, so does my kid.
> This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal?
You don’t need to look at a study, you can just look at zoning and land use maps for basically any city in America. Areas zoned single-family are not allowed to build anything else. There are multiple articles on Wikipedia[0][1][2] about this topic with literally hundreds of citations to primary and secondary sources. What a frustrating question.
Different strokes indeed. As a very happy apartment/flat/condo dweller, the suburban home life feels to me like being trapped in a tiny deserted island (the cartoon ones, with a single coconut tree), just a tiny personal plot surrounded by endless nothingness, with nowhere to go within reach. When in the suburbs I end up just staying in the couch all the time, because I can't be bothered to face the big journey necessary to go places, feels very isolating.
> As a very happy apartment/flat/condo dweller, the suburban home life feels to me like being trapped in a tiny deserted island (the cartoon ones, with a single coconut tree), just a tiny personal plot surrounded by endless nothingness, with nowhere to go within reach. When in the suburbs I end up just staying in the couch all the time, because I can't be bothered to face the big journey necessary to go places, feels very isolating.
This sounds like a cartoon version of suburbs! Can you point at actual suburbs (google map links) where you might be surrounded by endless nothingness and can't walk anywhere?
I've lived most of my life in suburbs in the US and have never experienced this. The only time I lived in a place I couldn't walk to any destination was when I lived in a quite rural area. But that was rural, not suburban.
Not the OP but when I lived in the US as an exchange student I lived in a suburb that looked exactly like the one in this video[1], which seems to be a fairly typical middle class neighborhood.
Like him I had the same experience of barely being able to walk anywhere, given how little space there even is for pedestrians.
In the middle of the aerial shot I see what looks like some kind of store complex and there's another commercial-looking building on the far left of the frame. Can't tell what kinds of stores are in these buildings, but they are within an extremely short walk from the houses in the video.
So I'm not sure how this is an example of suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.
There's more parking lots and roads reserved for cars then there's space for people to walk. When people think of walkable towns they mean something like this: https://youtu.be/zDLa-uCq9Ws?t=137
Car free zones, shops, restaurants and pedestrians taking up 90% of the space, mixed. Not one lonely sad mall. It's not an exgaratation to say when you pull up an aerial google map shot of a US suburb, there's more asphalt than people or buildings.
> There's more parking lots and roads reserved for cars then there's space for people to walk. When people think of walkable towns they mean something like this: https://youtu.be/zDLa-uCq9Ws?t=137
Ok but that's changing the goalposts of the discussion.
I totally agree it's more cute to walk in Heidelberg than the suburban area shown in that video (wherever it was). I've spent some time there and it was nice.
But the claim in the top of the thread was that in a suburb you are forced to stay home because it is basically impossible to walk anywhere, nothing is reachable on foot within reasonable distance. In my experience that's not true and I question whether it is true in most areas. Whenever I've lived in suburbs in the US (which is most of my life) I've always been able to walk to nearly everything I need within a reasonable & convenient walk. I often do because it's nice to walk.
If you change the discussion to be whether it's prettier and nicer to walk in a pedestrian street like in the video, then sure, I agree.
Indeed :) Living too far away from any metropolitan area makes me feel claustrophobic as there is usually very little social groups active in my favorite hobbies/niches unless near a city.
Claustrophobia feels like the right word to me; suburban life feels like being trapped in whichever tiny little patch of land is yours, hemmed in on all sides by not-yours, not-welcome, keep-out places belonging to other people. Such places feel especially confining to those who cannot drive.
It is two sides of the same coin I think. People are horrible and wonderful, and museums and forests are both wonderful. If we invent spatial warps I want a front door in one of these big Galician high rises and a back door in a tiny house somewhere forested mountains meet the sea. I'm up for learning Galego.
Edit: I am aware green spain has places where forested mountains meet the sea, so I guess it could be a really short spatial warp, but there is something about standing somewhere you can sing as loud as you can, and knowing no one could hear you but the squirrels.
Indeed. I'm very happy I can live in a large house with a lot of land for next to nothing. Please all stay in cities, but don't complain about the housing crisis and housing prices; it's quite obvious that if you want to all live together prices will rise.
The Anglosphere is more car dependent and more prone to NIMBY policies and housing shortages than continental Europe, because continental Europeans are more comfortable with density. Density is the solution to many land management problems.
OTOH continental Europe seems to be more prone to try to solve housing affordability with rent control, which basically results in NIMBY through the perverse incentives it imposes.
Except our distaste for flats has plummeted us into one of the worst housing crises of the entire world. Literally grinding our entire society to a halt, from students to young couples to prisoners to elders to cured long-term patients, everyone is trapped.
I don't actually think americans have a distaste for flats in general, but that some of them felt the need to impose their distaste for flats beyond the borders of their own land
The feasibility of widespread bike usage doesn't just depend on density. It depends a lot on a region's weather, too.
Amsterdam, for example, happens to have weather that's relatively compatible with biking, all throughout the year.
On the other hand, for four to six months of the year, most areas of Canada, and even a good portion of the US, definitely don't.
While a very small handful of people can handle biking when it's consistently -10 °C (14 °F) or colder out, possibly through 10 cm (4") or more of uncleared snow/slush, and possibly on ice, the vast majority of people can't and won't.
The summer isn't necessarily any better. The cities in southern Ontario, for example, where many Canadians live, can become surprisingly hot and humid for weeks at a time, and biking isn't pleasant then.
Given those conditions, people will definitely try to drive instead of biking.
No, it's really not a myth. Biking in the winter is not fun unless you have completely enclosed paths. Finnish culture means that people do it anyway, but that wouldn't fly in American culture, no matter how good the snow removal and bike lanes are. I say this as someone who bikes year round in a northern city, the vast majority of people have no interest in biking in the cold.
Calling Amsterdam an ideal city for cycling is a stretch.
It's coldish, it rains quite a lot and it's very windy.
Things would be a lot easier for people on bikes here in
Milan, Italy where I live... except that they are not.
It's not so safe during rush hour, and it's full of people who
would rather take their stupid car instead of walking half a mile.
Distances are larger in North America, but climate-wise people cycle more in NYC or in Minneapolis than they do in Atlanta or in Dallas.
To sum it up: make cycling as safe as possible, and discourage car use, and especially car abuse -- picking up kids from school with an SUV, for example.
In general the farther north you go in North America the more people on bikes you find. Most people do not bike when it is near freezing or below, there are a few.
Even in perfect conditions there's a lot of reasons not to bike.
Distances are more difficult, you can't bring someone with you, your carrying capacity is much smaller for shopping trips. It also just plain takes longer to get anywhere and people just don't like spending more time than they have to on errands.
> You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike.
There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car...
I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop into the shop to buy milk a block away". Some neighborhoods in cities don't have local grocery shops. So if you're used to that built environment your first thought is "I can't fit a month's worth of food in a cargo bike, let alone ride for 10 miles!?"
But if you propose letting a grocery shop in the neighborhood people think "parking, traffic and noise are gonna be terrible!"
Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into it. For example, today I visited a store, my favourite coffee shop, a pharmacy, and two grocery stores in the span of a little more than an hour. I didn't even cycle, I just walked. The first store was 10 mins away from home.
And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.
Imo, you are no longer talking about cycling once you're talking about ebikes and other motorized vehicles.
You're talking about convincing people to buy worse cars.
Motorbikes and mopeds and scooters already exist and people largely don't choose them over cars. Changing it to "electric scooter" or ebike doesn't suddenly make it more appealing.
And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.
> And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.
> Because electric bikes are less physically demanding on joints and muscles, they not only bring in riders who might otherwise be inactive, but they also offer the opportunity for people to ride longer periods of time and go greater distances. That leads to more folks using e-bikes as an option for commuting or running errands. Although users won’t find themselves doing the sort of vigorous physical activity uphill mountain biking or even hot yoga entails, e-bike use has been shown to deliver the sort of moderate physical activity most doctors recommend.
The exercise provided by ebikes when all things are equal is lower than regular bikes, but all things are not equal as people with ebikes tend to ride more day to day (on aggregate).
This depends on legislation, but in a lot of countries ebikes that don't require pedaling are illegal. From personal experience, riding on an ebike still provides plenty of exercise, certainly more than the literally zero that you get when driving.
In any case, I only brought up ebikes in the context of arduous journeys. Most people will not travel by ebike, they're too expensive.
It's not about trying to persuade people in car-dependent places to go against the grain and bike everywhere. Rather, a network of bike infrastructure should be built, making biking a viable choice. In time biking would become normalized, nobody would need to be explicitly persuaded. After all, Americans don't drive everywhere because they've been convinced to, they do it because the ever-present car infrastructure makes it the most convenient option.
My car is a lot less effort that my ebike. And the car is faster as well. I ride my ebike for the trips too long for the acoustic bike, but there are still a lot of trips not in reasonable ebike range that I make.
Hell, my motorcycle was enough of a hassle compared to my car to forgo riding it often. Wearing gear, packing my lunch and everything else for a days work into saddlebags, and dealing with the weather was a pain compared to just hopping in my car. It would be worse on a bicycle. At least in a car I can listen to a podcast without feeling like I'm making a tradeoff with safety.
No, we just hear more about the anglosphere's problems because... we sadly live in an anglosphere obsessed world :). English being the dominant language means that we all hear about their problems but it's harder to internationally hear about say, France's problems.
I would love to read more on that. It would also be interesting to look at the places in former english colonies that do have higher residential buildings to see if continental immigration there might have been involved. It sounds like spain had a brief love affair with sprawl as well. Perhaps some of it is just that when the population boom arrived for the US sprawl was in style and we had the room?
I think it's more about the political system, first past the post is looking archaic now. Not that proportional representation solves every problem but it would be a giant leap in the right direction.
It doesn't seem like cities need to coerce anyone to live in them. But when visiting cities it is better for the city, it's inhabitants and their visitors if they don't bring their negative externalities along from elsewhere.
They do need to coerce people for funding, which might as well be the same thing. That’s like saying “people aren’t forced to attend public schools” - well yeah, but by forcing them to pay for it anyways you leave many with little other option. Meanwhile a quarter of American roads are private. Private transportation would exist with or without force. And in anything other than a big city, private transportation continues to be superior than even the most well funded public transport.
Care to provide link proving your assumptions? Every time I checked stats for that for some particular country it was always cities subsidizing countryside/suburbs, not vice versa.
Care must be taken when evaluating those statistics because all the ones I've seen are done only in dollar terms and entirely discount the economic beneficiaries of the movement of people and goods.
For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city.
Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place.
Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.
That is one way to look at it. Another way is that you are paying (indirectly) for infrastructure and (directly) with subsidies for some people to lace your soda with high fructose corn syrup. Or to dry up the land by siphoning all water to make some stupid almond milk.
Yes, the web of subsidy is wide and complex, but not all subsidies are for the same reason.
For example, the fructose corn syrup subsidies exist, as far as I can tell, in order to on-shore agricultural profits and ensure sufficient slack in the domestic agricultural system to ensure that restrictions on imports of food, such as in the case of war, would not seriously affect the USA. That is, it's a subsidy towards food security.
Which assumptions? I said nothing about subsidizing cities or suburbs. I said cars and roads would exist without the government, but anything resembling public transport would not.
It's not about being 'comfortable with density', it's about having a society where neighbours respect each other, behave decently, and keep noise/mess under control, don't keep setting the fire alarm off, etc.
The noise problem isn't limited to loud music and parties, just the noise of kids playing loudly and running around in communal areas can become infuriating to neighbours.
Even if you've got good neighbours, there's other downsides with flats - a lack of parking/EV charging, often nowhere to safely store a bicycle even. No space to install personal 'green tech' such as solar or a heat pump. No garage/shed to store tools/bikes/hobby equipment.
How about compared to Europeans? Japanese have a totally different nearly pseudo-feudal culture that enforces submission and conformity ("the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"). Among western states which share a more individualist culture with the US, I don't think there's all that much difference in behavior.
More dense construction in urban areas will probably help make single family homes affordable for those who want them.
I imagine people who own single family homes in nice suburbs are pretty happy about it, especially if they bought it when prices were half of what they are currently and are paying <3% interest.
> More dense construction in urban areas will probably help make single family homes affordable for those who want them.
Probably the opposite effect for SFHs in the urban areas. People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family, and those are gradually being replaced by these multi-family dwellings, so the supply of them is actually going down.
Well yes. There is more demand for housing in urban areas than there is room for detached single family homes. Either prices will continue to increase beyond the affordability of those raising families, or density can increase.
That's why they are urban areas, not suburban or rural.
> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family
I also think this is kind of a US-centric experience, or at least doesn't take pricing and location into account. I suppose most people would prefer a single family home in central Manhattan but that doesn't exist, and if it did it would be unaffordable.
Now a single family detached home with a convenient transit commute into the city would be great. The US isn't great at building those either.
> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family,
I don't think it's that simple. I mean, everyone would love a big house on a big yard that is close to everything, but approximately nobody gets to do that. In reality there are always tradeoffs, and the the tradeoffs build in incentives - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, that people respond to. In a lot of the US those incentives have skewed pretty hard recently to exurban singles but that's not universal.
These sorts of things are hugely affected by infrastructure planning and subsidies, etc. At the end of the day people choose between the options they have, not the ones they wish they had.
Same. I grew up in a house, but I've lived in apartments and buildings in the city. When it came time to buy, I bought a house. I can't ever see myself not living in a house ever again.
There's also a pretty big variance between a European city for example which usually doesn't have very tall high rises, and living in midtown Manhattan.
Yep - SF and Honolulu were frustrating places to live. Waiting for elevators. Shared laundry spaces. No privacy. Noisy neighbors. Noisy parking garages. Noisy street traffic.
I spent 6 months in Sweden and have traveled to a handful of other European countries.
The quiet suburban/rural life is for me. After growing up in LA, bouncing around SF, DC and HNL I have settled in Michigan and really enjoy it here. Plenty of room, not very congested, progressive policies. Life is good (albeit sometimes very cold)
It means that when you look at government revenue vs expenditure per square mile, urban dwellers are massively subsidizing surburbanites. It's mainly because maintainence of roads, parking, and utilities for a spread-out surburbia is vastly less efficient than it is for a tightly packed city.
We all pay taxes, I don't see an issue. I pay significantly more taxes than people who are living in more affordable/dense housing in the city - both in property taxes as well as the fact that I earn a higher income. I am subsidizing lots of other people in my community.
There are loads of people who believe this but who are mistaken. Typically they are underestimating the value of services delivered to them for free at the point of use. We don't know your individual situation of course, but it's true in the aggregate.
Sounds like a problem with the system, and not a problem that should be projected/blamed on individuals. No one likes paying taxes, but I believe most people are willing to contribute to the common good when they know that it is actually going towards the common good. I feel this way at least and have a decent sense based on anecdotal conversations that a lot of others do too. I am willing to pay more taxes if I know that it is going to directly help people around me, and raise the quality of my entire community. Unfortunately that is often not the case.
It is indeed the system, and you (to no fault of your own, probably) are part of that system. NotJustBikes, while a little anti-car-propogandaey for my tast, does a good just explaining why it'd be basically impossible for suburbia to ever pay for itself: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0?si=F-ePxGzjUjHrSJCR
Living in a single family home may be nice, but it's resource inefficient to the point of wasteful. Among the resources wasted are energetic and spatial resources. There is a reason per capita energy consumption in the US dwarfs that in other countries. The society bears a huge cost for the individual decision to live alone.
> Between 1950 and 1975, thousands of Spaniards migrated from the countryside to the city. Franco's dictatorship Ministry of Housing promoted the construction of high-rise housing estates to accommodate them.
The same thing happened in other countries like the US, UK and France, yet the outcome was negative rather than positive. What was different about Spain that it worked out well?
(side point: I would rather have read an article with figures than a movie-like feature like this).
There were failures in ensuring the new high rising estates don't become ghettos due to lack of opportunities and self-reinforcing vicious cycles, which have been in large part corrected and have been taken into account for any new high rise / housing (re)developments. And there has been a lack of enough developments in the big cities for a variety of reasons. But overall I wouldn't say the outcome wss negative. Millions of people have somewhere to live which is more often than not with decent quality and availability of opportunities.
Your point is good: I have friends in some developments around Paris and they are perfectly fine. But the hostile banlieus are pretty bad, and such hostile environments have developed in the UK and USA to the point where they are being torn down.
One of the first websites with all kinds of Apple-like scrolling effects that doesn't slow down the scrolling experience. I'm on a RPi4 by the way. Good job of the dev!
Linux, Chrome. I can't even read the website, feels like it watching animated GIF loading on dialup modem in 1994. It jumps from one area to another randomly
Hardware rendering, lol? It's just a website, not a video game. My system is quite powerful. At least high-res OpenArena runs like a charm.
Why do I need GPU to access the information - that's the question. What did they do so the website works worse than a 3D video game? Obviously I am missing something.
Welcome to the 2010s? Browsers have had 3D features for a decade, on top of 2D rendering pipelines running on GPUs. This is why you can browse the web in your phone without your battery only lasting 15 minutes.
By condo you mean apartment right? Condos are usually just apartments you own.
Apartments are not inherently bad. They allow for density which, if you went through the tour this site provides, you know allows for cheaper public services. I've lived in many great apartments and a few bad ones. It's not the style of building that's bad, it's the owners and the laws they are forced to or not forced to follow.
Suburbs are _heavily_ subsidized. They require a ton of money from taxpayers to sustain their existence. So much so that many North American cities are essentially permanently in a state of insolvency because they can't sustain the infrastructure needed for suburbs. Think about this, for a suburb you have inherently more roads and more distance to cover for things like sewers, power/cable lines, water mains, etc. Plus you just take up more space so suburbs don't tend to be walkable in terms of productive travel. You can walk your dog in a suburb, but if you need groceries you'll be driving. So you pay more for suburbs even if you don't live in them AND they require you to pay for a car which depending on circumstances can total a few thousand dollars a year, especially if you don't have the money to drop on a car that doesn't require a lot of maintenence.
As mentioned in this website, suburbs should always be considered a luxury. The vast majority of people should live in more dense areas. It's better for the environment, personal finances, city economies, physical and social health (ever wonder why Europeans live longer?), etc. If you want to live in a suburb, good for you! But I believe we should fully stop subsidizing them. Start making suburb communities compensate cities financially for the imbalance they impose on our systems.
> Suburbs are _heavily_ subsidized. They require a ton of money from taxpayers to sustain their existence.
That's highly relative. Urban areas have high maintenance costs as well, precisely because of the higher density. The infrastructure requires more maintenance, higher sanitation costs, law enforcement, etc. Not to mention that cramming hundreds of people per km², surrounded by concrete and no vegetation, in small and dimly lit apartments, is awful for mental health. I know where I would prefer to live during the next pandemic.
> It's better for the environment
How is it better for the environment, exactly? Cities destroy the environment just by existing, and they hardly have enough green areas to sustain wild life.
> physical and social health (ever wonder why Europeans live longer?)
This has nothing to do with the urban lifestyle. Europeans live longer on average because of less socioeconomic inequality, healthier diets, and better healthcare systems.
> Urban areas have high maintenance costs as well, precisely because of the higher density.
Urban areas cost more in total, but less per capita. If you don't take that per capita measurement into account, it's pointless to claim things like this.
See specifically the massive (4-10x) increase in costs for things like roads, sidewalks, water, sewers, transportation, etc. when we talk about suburban environments.
> Cities destroy the environment just by existing, and they hardly have enough green areas to sustain wild life.
Do you have a source for this? Living closer to the things you need in life such as energy, food, water, friends, family obviously leads to less waste of energy in getting to those things or having them come to you. Around wildlife, guess where they could and used to live before suburban sprawl? Right where the suburbs popped up. Your solution to increasing wildlife is continuing suburban sprawl? I highly recommend you research and provide sources before making claims like that.
Thanks for the link. I stand corrected regarding the cost difference.
Though I still think the urban lifestyle comes at the expense of quality of life. It's wrong to optimize for lower cost, which often means that other factors important for wellbeing are neglected. Being surrounded by concrete instead of nature has a detrimental effect to our psychological and physical health, with urban runoff being one problem[1]. The amount of air and noise pollution is usually higher in cities than in rural areas[2]. All urban conveniences aren't enough to make this worthwhile, though this is a personal stance, and others may disagree.
And, yes, the suburban sprawl is also damaging to the environment. But we know much more today about sustainable infrastructure than we did in the 1950s. The same is true for cities, but it's a much larger effort to bring cities in balance with nature than rural areas. It's not just a matter of planting trees, and electrifying transportation. These are decade-long projects with enormous cost[3], and governments tend to drag their feet. In contrast, the environmental impact of suburbs can be lowered by relatively minor personal changes[4], which is much more manageable.
I'm not claiming to be an expert in any of this, and ultimately my position is driven by a dislike of cities in general. But thanks for clarifying some of my misconceptions. This research was eye opening.
No reason to feel bad! I like taking opportunities like this to respond with facts I've learned through heavy research in this area in the past few years.
I also don't want _anyone_ to feel like cattle. When I talk about apartments I want to be clear, I'm not talking about shacks with thin walls, 50 stories, and no greenspace. The ideal apartment has almost all the benefits of living in a suburb (good amount of space for yourself and others, greenery, privacy, sturdiness and soundproofing, cleanliness etc.) with the added benefit of allowing you to potentially not own a car, and without the extreme requirement of subsidies from any level of government.
These ideas are growing in popularity, in part led by content creators like Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, Climate Town, and thought leaders like those at Strong Towns. If you have a chance, please check any of those out. I think you'll find what I found after learning about this stuff which is that no way of living is inherently evil, but some ways of living such as suburban sprawl are just more expensive in many ways. We just haven't done a good job at making those costs clear to those who live in suburbs, because governments absorb the cost and collect increased taxes from all to make up the difference. And as is so common worldwide, people tend to hate taxes, so that isn't even enough and it leads to cities with budgets that will never be healthy and simply cannot provide the services everyone wants such as regular cleaning, better education, solid public transportation, etc.
I don't know which one becomes more expensive per capita, but "more distance" is very simplistic metric.
Think of how much money and time and coordination it requires to dig a 200ft trench somewhere in Manhattan. Street closures, permits with multiple organizations, coordinate with tons of utilities and other underground facilities, engineering surveys if you're digging near high rises, etc.
Meanwhile in the suburbs one guy in a pickup shows up with a digger and gets it done before lunch.
Density also bring in enormous complexity, so it's not that simple.
> You can walk your dog in a suburb, but if you need groceries you'll be driving.
I live in a suburb and I walk to one of three nearby (< 10 min walk) grocery stores.
> I live in a suburb and I walk to one of three nearby (< 10 min walk) grocery stores.
That is an outlier, though. Not only are suburbs less dense and, obviously, services are not as close, but county and/or city regulations across the US are notoriously anti mixed use developments, which make things even worse.
The National walkability index guide [0] gives suburbs a "below average" walkability score.
Informally, there's also a website called Walkscore [1], where users rate walkability in many cities and towns across the US. Even most cities rank lower than 60 out of 100, and suburbs, given the almost nation-wide aversion to mixed use buildings, do not rank higher.
Coming from Europe, it was a huge shock when I knew that I would have to walk 15 minutes to reach the closest grocery store. That, and the fact that in the US, sidewalks seem to disappear at random intervals for whatever reason.
Thank you, the EPA doc and interactive map is interesting and I had not seen that one before.
The blocks are a bit weird. For example zooming into my neighborhood there is a house with a score of 93 but the house next door (no more than 50ft away) has a score of 70 just because it falls in a different map block. Although in reality people from both houses can walk to the same things with same ease.
Found an even more extreme case in Mountain View. Houses on one side of Shoreline Blvd have a score of 90 and houses on the other side a score of 10! Shoreline has pedestrian crossings, so houses on each side should logically have the same score.
So while interesting at a big scale view, the data is flawed.
The walkscore site I was familiar with and I think it's quite bad, does not reflect reality.
Are we talking about the same thing when we talk about suburbs?
Here's the Oxford dictionary's definition: an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.
There are always outliers and exceptions to the rule but modern suburbs are a pretty simple yet flawed idea. They allow residential single-family zoned lots with very few exceptions and they look like clusters of anywhere from 1 to hundreds of housing development projects connected together by roads.
Can you physically walk from your suburb to a grocery store? Absolutely! But for hundreds of millions of Americans, almost none of which would ever take on that task by choice, this looks like walking a few miles at least round trip and crossing at least a couple of highly-dangerous multi-lane roads around the stores they are heading to. This is just how things work in suburbs, everything is so spread out that cars turn out to be the only feasible transportation method. If cars are the only way to get around, roads need to be made wider and faster especially around those areas people are trying to get to--like stores.
This is all part of why there's growing concern around building practices that promote suburb-like development.
Try living in a damp victorian house in Bimingham, with unfixable mould problems, where the floor has 6 carpets from 6 generations stacked on top of each-other and the bathroom is all weired because originally toilet was designed to be outside.
That's like half of UK housing.
The people who would rather live in an old 50 sqm house than a modern apartment must be abusing some serious substances
Love why? It's not the only comparison/analysis that can be made but it's an interesting one, to pick countries with roughly equivalent planning parameters.
i'm glad they're happy but that sounds actually terrible. infinitely worse than living on a large plot of land with trees and a garden, having a nice shop to work in, a comfortable home office, a spacious kitchen, plenty of space for cars. i honestly can't see how people prefer this; i am assuming at this point it's cope and/or people who are trying to gaslight everyone into preferring it for policy/environmental/political reasons.
I don't live in Spain but I live in a reasonably dense city.
* More things to do.
* More people to meet.
* More restaurants, which leads to the best restaurants being better.
* More mom and pop businesses. I didn't know independent shoe stores were a thing until I moved here.
* Live entertainment everywhere, both to enjoy and to participate in.
* Walking to get coffee is very nice. Walking to get groceries is super nice.
* Huge freedom of movement on a bike. OK, rural rail trails are cool, but they're lines. In a good city, I have trails but also the entire street grid.
* Access to trains and buses which will take me to places I can drink without worrying about DUI.
* Watching the innocent shenanigans that go on around makes life more interesting.
The peace of mind of knowing that my living arrangements are reasonably sustainable, both environmentally and economically, is also nice.
FWIW, I could afford to life in suburbia or the country, but I like the city better. I do love taking weekend backpacking trips in the mountains, so I'm not some nature-phobe.
Poverty, that's how. They live in flats because they can't afford US-style houses (climate would allow them easily), and can't afford 70km average commute radius - car-only because sprawl can't be covered by public transport.
They live in apartments not because they are so conscious about urban planning, but because they can't afford to do otherwise. Give people money and they want to move to single-family houses in suburbs.
People want to live near the city center. They want to be able to walk and get anywhere easily and that's means they want to live in an apartment in a city.
Actually, nowadays is cheaper to buy a house with a garden than an apartment and guess what people are trying to buy?
No, buddy, it's the reverse. The sparsest provinces with rural backgrounds (the Castilles [except for maybe Zamora-Salamanca-Leon] , Aragon, Extremadura)... are the poorest. The most populated ones are the ones with the most quality jobs and people has much better salaries and ofc the cost of everything it's on par: Bilbao, Valencia, Barcelona, Madrid...
Also, as they stated owning a flat in the center of your city or town it's expensive as fuck, while owning a 'villa' in the outskirts in the middle of nowhere in Ye Olde Farmtown it's dirt cheap.
