

"Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work" - paganel
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96sep/kunstler/kunstler.htm

======
grellas
I grew up in a town of 80,000 in the midwestern U.S. and remember it as being
completely undistinguished in terms of "character" - it had very average
homes, many clustered about a fading downtown, it had light suburban sprawl,
it had a meat packing plant and a lot of agricultural-related enterprises and
a very few smokestack industry buildings with related infrastructure (railroad
lines, etc.). It had absolutely nothing to commend it as far as "character"
goes. On top of everything else, it had almost no aesthetics to speak of,
being covered for much of the year in deep (and often dirty) snow blankets and
drifts. Yet it had more "soul" and "community" than most of what I have
experienced in living in more sophisticated places (San Francisco, Silicon
Valley) in 40+ years since I moved from there as a kid. Why? Because it had
_great people_. That is what makes "community," not buildings as ends in
themselves.

Now, a place like San Francisco has incredible character in many of its
neighborhoods. Aesthetically, it can't be beat for those qualities that make a
place special. But I would wager that the vast stretches of Silicon Valley
lying south of the City contain large majorities of their residents who
couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl
and all. I have lived with such people for many years. They love such
qualities as "safe," "quiet," "consistent" [as in quality of a neighborhood],
and the like. When a Wal-Mart opens up, they are excited about the savings
they will get in shopping there. And the same goes for all the other elements
that we associate with "sprawl."

Now, it may be spiritually consoling to some, as it is to the author, to be
able to walk past and appreciate the fine qualities of old courthouses and
other custom-built buildings of the past. In a free society, however, such
aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice,
they will often choose utility. Yes, we would all love to own that old
Victorian that has so much character and that sells for $3 million in a cute
San Francisco neighborhood but many people don't have the luxury of being able
to afford such a thing, no matter how aesthetically pleasing. For some, that
little house on a busy corner of an undistinguished suburban town will have to
do because this gives them an affordable home in which to live and to raise
their kids. Those are the kinds of homes I and my friends all grew up in and
we did not think for a moment that our souls were being deprived of what we
needed or that our close circle of friends somehow lacked community just
because we couldn't run with the snob crowd.

I think an article like this reflects one legitimate way of looking at life
but it is a mistake to project this view on society at large. While the
author's viewpoint might be seen as commendable from an idealistic perspective
of how things ought to be, I would guess there are few people who consciously
think this way in living their day-to-day lives. A vast number of them have
lived many years in such places as "plastic city" (what San Jose has been
called for years) and not given even a second thought about the alleged
deadening of their souls as a result of that experience.

~~~
lkrubner
It is perfectly valid for you to write this:

"contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and
far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all"

but you can not combine it with this:

"In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against
utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility."

Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be
careful how you use the phrase "free society". Because the population is
relatively sparse in the suburbs (compared to a dense city), the cost of
procurement of infrastructure tends to go up on a per capita basis. Just think
of the energy loss carrying electricity, kilometer after kilometer, in the
suburbs, and compare that to carrying the same amount of energy in the city,
where the power does not need to travel as much of a distance (per capita).
For any given 100,000 people a dense city allows the cheaper availability of
roads and sewers and power and transport. Such density is economically
rational.

Think carefully about some of the things that people love most about the
suburbs. One thing people love is the wide open spaces, and the lack of crowds
(especially compared to a dense urban core). And yet, the crowds in the city
are usually economically rational, especially compared to the expense of
provisioning the suburbs. Think about the wide open highways of Texas - "wide
open" means "used less than a road in New York City" and the greater use that
the road gets in New York City means the money spent on it is more wisely
spent.

The suburbs need to be seen as a luxury item. Since the USA is wealthy, it can
afford many luxuries, and the suburbs are one of them. But the suburbs are
more luxurious than the cities, and the cities are more economically rational.

And of course, in the suburbs, one has to use a car to get anywhere. This is,
of course, a tremendous use of resources, on a per capita basis. In a dense
urban core, such as New York City, you can travel by mass transit, which uses
less resources per capita. And you can even travel by foot or by bicycle. The
suburbs depend on the use of automobiles, and automobiles, too, need to be
seen as luxury items. Again, because the USA is wealthy, it can afford many
luxuries, but again, the heavy dependence on the automobiles makes the life in
the suburbs more resource intensive, per capita, than life in the city.

Where you use the phrase "free society" I would prefer the use of the phrase
"subsidized society".

Where you use the word "utility" I would use the word "subsidy." And yes, of
course, everyone would like to live in a heavily subsidized society, so long
as you can get the subsidies from someone else.

~~~
lkrubner
Why is this being downvoted? Does someone want to make the argument that life
in suburbs in less resource intensive per capita than life in a dense urban
core? If so, they should make that argument and I'll make my counter-argument.
But my point is fairly obvious: people living close together can share be
provided with infrastructure with less resources per capita, or to put it
another way, the denser the population the more intensely used any given piece
of infrastructure is likely to be used (the same point, stated the other way
round). Think of a road in New York City, and then think of a road west of
Washington DC, in the suburbs of Virginia. Which gets more use?

I suspect that anyone wanting to downvote my comment is someone who themselves
lives in the suburbs, and they are downvoting my comment because my post makes
them uncomfortable. But just because an idea makes you uncomfortable doesn't
make it untrue. My point is entirely valid, and it is correct.

~~~
usaar333
I didn't downvote, but I am not convinced infrastructure cost is that much
higher in the suburbs.

In a dense core, maintenance and development are vastly much costlier than in
the suburbs Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier.
If you close a road in a suburb to do work on it or do other construction, no
big deal; in a city, you create horrible traffic problems. Politically you
have to deal with 3-4x as many people per mile work of anything in a city. In
an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but when
other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much
cheaper. Just look how expensive it is to live in a big city in the US
relative to a suburb.

~~~
lkrubner
You do not understand what I've written. No where did I mention absolute
price. I am talking strictly about resources used per capita. Let me emphasize
that:

PER CAPITA

You write:

"Acquiring land for any project is going to be harder and pricier. "

Yes, obviously. Of course the land is pricier in the big urban cities. This
has nothing to do with what I wrote.

The resources used PER CAPITA in suburbs will be greater than the resources
used PER CAPITA in a dense urban core, other things being equal. This is a
simple matter of space and resource use. Resources will tend to be more
heavily used in a dense urban core, therefore society gains more benefit from
that those resources, assuming the point of the resource is to be used.

Compare the use of fuel in the city, and fuel in suburbs. Much fuel in the
suburb is spent on automobiles, which are well known to be inefficient. In a
city you will have mass transit, which offers a more efficient use of fuel,
per capita.

You write:

"In an urban environment, sure fuel costs per person drop drastically, but
when other costs are taken into account, I remain unconvinced it is so much
cheaper."

Nowhere did I say the city was cheaper than the suburbs. I suggest the
opposite - the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. And I suggest the reason
why - it is because the suburbs are subsidized to a greater extent than the
cities.

There is a large literature on this subject in the field of urban planning.

~~~
evgen
When you talk about "subsidies" for abstract "resources" and then try to
decouple them from the available market in these resources (through such terms
as "other things being equal") you are engaging in a bit of sophistry. Yes,
resource usage may be greater per capita in the suburbs, but the most
expensive resource in most cases is space/land and it is very, very expensive
in urban cores. Urban space is so expensive that it often washes out the more
efficient usage of other resources that density can offer.

You can claim that in a city people will have mass transit available, but with
only a few exceptions in the US that mass transit is underutilized and really
only serves to get a small fraction of the urban residents to work and back;
it does not serve other daily needs quite as well, so after taking mass
transit back from work you will hop into your car to go get groceries or go
out for some entertainment in the evening.

If these magical subsidies truly existed at the level you are suggesting they
would be both obvious and a source of growing political friction given the re-
urbanization of the American population. Could you point out some examples of
these subsidies? [And before you start, "fuel" does not really count since it
cuts both ways in this argument and urban residents to not lead significantly
more fuel efficient lives than their suburban counterparts.]

~~~
meric
"Urban space is so expensive that it often washes out the more efficient usage
of other resources that density can offer."

Err... He capitalized "PER CAPITA".

In cities, a piece of land the size of 6 suburban homes (counting backyard)
can be home to several thousand people, that's why land is expensive.

Go to Hong Kong, you'll see apartment buildings with 40 floors. On each floor
there are 20 units. In each unit there are 2 rooms, a living room, a kitchen
and a toilet. Each room is 2.5 metres by 2.5 metres, the living room 3 times
that. Anywhere from 2 to 6 people can live in a single unit, but usually 4;
The government doesn't hand out public housing with 2 rooms to only 2 people.
4 * 20 * 40 is over 3200 residents.

In the suburbs the same land is home to only around two dozen people. Thus it
would make sense that in Hong Kong land could be a hundred times more
expensive than in a suburb anywhere else.

~~~
evgen
I understand what PER CAPITA means and I was stating explicitly that the
claims being made were, on a PER CAPITA basis, erroneous.

A plot of land can only be home to several thousand people if you are willing
to pay _a lot_ of money to build it in that fashion. Building up is not a cost
saving measure, it is a demand placed upon a plot of land as a consequence of
population density. Building suburban homes for several thousand people will
occupy more land than a dense urban apartment tower, but it will be an order
of magnitude cheaper to build in the first place.

~~~
lkrubner
You write:

"Building up is not a cost saving measure"

There has been a consistent misreading in this thread, focusing on cost. My
focus was not on cost, but on resource use. Nowhere did I suggest that cities
were cheaper than the suburbs. I stated above that building in a city is
pricier than building in the suburbs.

However, my point was, the suburbs use more resources. The biggest resource
that is used in the suburbs is land. Per capita, the suburbs use up much more
land than the cities do. The geographical dispersion leads to more resource
use in the suburbs.

Consider electricity being carried over a wire. Some energy is lost for every
kilometer the energy needs to be carried. In a city, you might have 100,000
people living in just a few blocks - the energy does not need to travel far,
per capita. In the suburbs, the same 100,000 people might be spread out over
many kilometers.

I have not mentioned the environmental impact, but we could discuss that too.
The suburbs use up a lot of land. The suburbs have a major impact on forests
and lakes and rivers, and the wildlife that depends on those forests and lakes
and rivers.

It might help to engage in a thought experiment about how much land you could
free up if all people clumped together in an urban area as dense as New York
City. In the USA, the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and
Massachusetts have a combined population a little over 9 million. New York
City has a population a bit more than 8 million. Basically, if you wanted to
pack all these people into another New York, you would have a city smaller
than Massachusetts, and Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire would be pure,
untouched, pristine forest. Mind you, I am not suggesting this is a practical
idea, I'm simply offering this as a thought experiment, as a way of imagining
some of the environmental benefits of density.

~~~
usaar333
Several points:

1) It feels like you are exaggerating population densities. Outside of some
ultra high density areas in Manhattan, you aren't going to have 100,000 people
in a few blocks. The density of most cities is about 3 to 4x that of suburbs,
not orders of magnitude greater. (Note: I'm going off Bay Area data here).

2) Agreed on environmental costs not being accounted for. Developing suburbs
would cost more if they were; how much I can't say.

3) On your thought experiment, here's something to think about: The entire
world's population can fit in Texas (270,000 sq miles) at density levels found
in SF neighborhoods. You'd need just over 3 Texases (or a Texas + Alaska) to
do suburban density levels (~900,000 sq miles). But you would need about 19+
million sq miles for farming (russia + canada + us + china + brazil); in other
words, the land use savings gained from going fully urban is a rounding error.

3a) On top of that, you already have to build out roads, wires, etc. to get to
the farmland. When also given that the land everywhere can absorb some waste
with little effect (septic tanks), it actually is efficient to spread the
population more evenly throughout this hypothetical world.

4) Again the cost does matter. The interstate highway system has a lower cost
per person and higher average utilization per person (defined as US residents)
than San Francisco's Central subway does per person (SF residents). Ongoing
maintenance still looks the same; San Francisco needs to spend about $51M a
year on road maintenance. Sunnyvale is at $4.7M with a 6th of the population
and a 3rd the density. There might be some resources saved in higher density,
but something is dragging the per capita costs higher in highly dense areas.

------
russell
What the critics seem to forget is that when these wonderful places were built
they were out of reach for most Americans. My grandparents did not have
running water or central heating. In the cities most people, especially
immigrants, lived in tenements.

After WWII there was pent up saving and pent up demand. People bought cracker
box houses because they were cheap and way better than what they had been
living in. They bought cars, because they were affordable, enabling urban
sprawl.

As a kid, I lived in a farmhouse in Maine with little heat, no plumbing, no
running water and cold as hell. I remember my parents drilling a well, putting
in a bathroom and heat. What they and others did wasnt pretty, but in the
prosperity of the times we joined the middle class.

~~~
kemiller
More to the point, those grand houses (not to mention, all manor of nice
public works like subways in NYC) were built on the cheap labor of people who
couldn't dream of owning their own home. The reason that kind of architecture
became scarce in the 50's is that it became prohibitive for the merely-rich
(as opposed to super-rich) to hire armies of artisans to cater to every
detail.

------
evizaer
I'm not a particularly fast reader. I'm genuinely interested in what this
article may be trying to say, but there's so much lard in this writing that I
had to stop reading after a few paragraphs to save myself the potential huge
time loss inherent in getting through the entire thing and being disappointed
by the end meaning. The writing is so full of overwrought huge abstractions
and hyperbole instead of concrete fact that I can't push myself to even get
halfway through it.

I do share the feeling that it describes, though, about the uncaring nature of
the way we seem to construct towns these days.

~~~
gte910h
That's what the Atlantic is like. They rarely take pieces that aren't in a
similar style.

------
jerf
Ah, yes, the classic "Deep down inside, everybody _really_ thinks just like
me" essay.

I do not think everybody in America thinks just like an "architecture critic".
In fact I suspect most people in America, if introduced to an "architecture
critic" would say "And what's that?"

If people were really upset about this, it wouldn't be happening. Alas, deep
down inside, "everybody" pretty much likes what's happening.

~~~
nostromo
I actually think the 15 years since this article was written have proven the
author's point quite well.

* The exurbs have fallen drastically in price compared to urban dwellings which retained most of their value in the recession. Urban dwellings in the US's biggest cities have increased dramatically in price since the article was written, even including the recent drops.

* An urban renaissance has occurred in the US, with young people and investment again flowing to city centers. (Compare NY 1996 with NY 2010 - the progress is amazing.) The culture has followed. Most sitcoms (and many movies) of the 80s occurred in the suburbs, now they are almost entirely urban.

* Many cities started promoting more-dense zoning and mass transit, helped along by mid-decade energy spikes. Some cities have stopped providing water rights to new areas to combat sprawl.

* McMansions (not even a widely used term in 1996) have gone from must-have to gauche. The Hummer, a status-symbol of the commuting class at the time, was dismantled this year after several years of terrible sales.

~~~
ams6110
I think you are giving examples of fads not long term changes. It's the "grass
is greener" syndrome. People living out in the suburbs look at their long
commute, the cookie-cutter culture, and think that urban life is more exciting
and sensible. After a while, they look at the crowds, the filth, the noise,
their tin-can car or lack of one at all, and think that suburban space and
quiet and freedom looks pretty good all of a sudden. So it's an ebb and flow.

~~~
acgourley
While I can see individuals existing in that cycle, why would a whole society
synchronize around it? You would think market forces would keep all people out
of sync to level out prices.

~~~
jerf
Actually, somewhat counter-intuitively, oscillations are very normal and
natural and arise all over the place under fairly common conditions. An entire
semester of differential equations and this is just about the only thing I
took away from it, but in some ways it was still almost worth it.

The point I was sort of alluding to is that right now urban life has certain
undeniably advantages, along with certain undeniable disadvantages. I also
suspect the advantages are still going to grow for another decade or so. But
looking ahead to even some perfectly straightforward applications of trends
already in development across a wide variety of fields, I see a lot of
technologies emerging in 2025-2030 or so that will start bringing parity back
to the "sprawl", or, to invoke a buzzword that I think actually works better,
"decentralization". (I think the 2010s will come to be seen as the last dying
gasp of industrial-age centralization.) Our grandchildren will be aghast at
the horrors of our era of driving, for instance, not merely that we killed
ourselves by the thousands for it but that it took up all our concentration
for the duration. A fifteen minute drive in a rented car that automatically
picks you up and doesn't drop any of your net connections for the duration,
well heck that's hardly an inconvenience at all. In fact, "drive" is the wrong
word, it's a _ride_. Better delivery systems; robotics will make practical
things like grocery delivery in all but the most remote of areas. All of this
automated infrastructure can work on even existing battery technology, because
they remove the biggest problems with batteries which is the human issues of
charge time (these can use industrial strength chargers) and the downtime of a
given car is much less relevant. And so on for quite a while.

So what I see is a wave that will continue to go towards the cities, but then
recede back away from the cities, but actually in some sense, drag all the
good things about cities with them.

And my god, the hands that will wring as that is happening. We could probably
power half the shift with the mighty power of wringing hands. Which won't do a
damned thing to stop it.

------
japherwocky
So much of what this guy rambles about is so moot to anyone who's ever
actually worked in the building industry.

Why is he even qualified to have this opinion?

The premise that buildings "nowadays" are universally cheap and inferior is
stupid:

There have always been shitty buildings that don't last, because poor people
also need homes.

Cheap buildings today are significantly better protection against the elements
than shacks from the "good old days".

I agree with the spirit of the articles, so I guess I don't care (Yes, we
should encourage people to spend more money in the building industry! Yes,
hire a local artisan to make something!), but I think an economic argument is
more compelling than an emotional one.

~~~
whatusername
Thankyou for that. I've been a bit on the 'good-old-days' side about Buildings
and completely forgot about survivorship bias.

Just like all the music these days is crap (when we compare to only the best
songs that we remember from 30 years ago).

I think there might be something in the idea that we did it 'better' for
public buildings in the old days (Are there any buildings that cost remotely
the amount of National GDP that the Pyramids or the Great Wall did?) -- But I
think you're absolutely right when thinking about averages.

------
elblanco
One of the problems is that there are actually relatively few big cities in
the U.S. that also have the quality of being nice places to live. Most of them
are huge (or formerly huge) manufacturing centers, populated by people looking
for unskilled jobs. Cities are generally built as "nice places to live", they
arise because cities are efficient nodes for economic exchanges to take place.
Some urban areas have almost no housing at all!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tysons_Corner,_Virginia>

Outside of parts of New York, SF, Seattle (and maybe 2 or 3 others), most
urban centers are high crime dumps with the additional quality of being
frighteningly expensive to live in and then completely surrounded by vast
heavy industrial wastelands.

Don't get me wrong, I'd give my left leg to live in NYC at the standard of
living I have in boring suburbia. But back of the envelope calculations show
I'd have to make 3-7x what I make now.

At least the nice folks that built my suburb designed it with a walkable
layout to a commercial town-center stocked with everything from a Gym and
Movie theater to a dozen restaurants and groceries so I can pretend I live
there.

Most people who write this kind of stuff really don't mean "people should live
in cities"...what they really mean is "people should live in city (singular),
and that city should be NYC or SF (or Seattle in some cases)".

------
Umalu
For a different perspective on this, check out "The Grass is Indeed Greener:
How I gave up dreaming about the big city and learned to love the suburbs".
[http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.com/2010/10/grass-
is...](http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.com/2010/10/grass-is-indeed-
greener-how-i-stopped.html)

------
jazzyb
The author of this article gave one of my favorite Ted Talks on the same
topic:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html)

~~~
wpeterson
I wish this TED talk were the topic rather than his older Atlantic Essay. Much
better job of advancing and conveying his ideas.

------
akgerber
The places we currently build are by no means the product of a free market.
Automobile-based transportation is heavily subsidized both through direct
taxation paying for automobile-optimized roads as well as minimum parking
requirements that essentially proscribe building anything resembling a
walkable neighborhood in many cities. And those requirements mean that anyone
who doesn't drive to a business is forced to share in the cost of providing
parking for a business (which can be tens of thousands of dollars a parking
space). It's also quite rare for a business to ask employees to pay for
parking or to give any money back to employees that don't use free parking.

------
erikpukinskis
The problem goes much deeper. Everything we consider culture--architecture,
holidays, leisure activities, beauty standards, music, movies, career norms--
have evolved over the last fifty years to exploit us most efficiently for
cash.

Our culture no longer cares about us. It exists only to fuel "economic
growth".

I'm sorry if this seems reactionary or trollish. It is my true belief.

------
edw519
From September, 1996.

 _Can the momentum of sprawl be halted?_

It's already started. That McMansion 40 miles from town has already lost half
its value since 2006. What will it be worth when gas hits $10/gallon?

Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it.

But things still may not play out like OP would like. In my hometown, mom and
pop businesses are still being replaced by big box chains, even in town. I
never thought I'd see Home Depot, Target, & Costco 3 miles from downtown. If
it's too expensive to drive to the sprawl, we'll just bring the sprawl to
them.

~~~
stretchwithme
Free highways built the sprawl too. If you had to actually pay for the costs
of the highway that lets you sprawl, perhaps one would think twice.

~~~
usaar333
A lot of roads are done by private developers.

Freeways in rural areas aren't that pricey. The interstate highway system cost
about $500B inflation adjusted. Only about $1700/person amortized over 35
years. Or about $13M per mile.

To see how this isn't that pricey, consider the Central subway project in San
Francisco which will cost $1.6B for 1.7 miles - $1900/resident

~~~
stretchwithme
The roads in new developments are built by the developers. I'm not sure these
roads have much to do with deciding to drive to work or take the train.

Yes, its true that most interstates are rural. Of course that is true. I'm
sure that its 95% rural. That's the nature of a network that connects all of
the major cities in the country. And this 95% is probably a lot less relevant
to whether you decide to live in the suburbs than the much more expensive
part. Of course, your edit about the cost of the SF road acknowledges this
very fact.

Its also true that in dense urban areas, interstate highways make up a
fraction of the roads used for commuting.

Highways that must be put through existing neighborhoods are very expensive.
And that's where highways to the suburbs had to be built. Usually by forcing
other people from their homes. A lot of the true costs of building roads is
hidden in pollution too.

The cost to build something is not the only cost. Roads have to be maintained,
snow removed and potholes filled.

All I'm saying is that growth would be much more organic and justified if
those getting the benefits of sprawl paid its costs as they went, instead of
receiving a subsidy that distorts things.

------
mhb
Counterpoint:

<http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0898/aug98wha.htm>

~~~
enjo
The complaints in that article mostly stem from systemic problems with
abandoned city cores. In areas that have seen large-scale gentrification the
schools have predictably seen similar increases in achievement. Crime tends to
follow a similar trajectory.

What he's describing the headache that comes with being an urban 'pioneer'.

I'll also take exception with gems like:

 _Nobody lays in their bed in Plano and hears gunshots half a mile away._

Except that they do. I still own a house in Plano (in the most suburban
'safest' part), and in the year in a half that we lived there (2005-2007) we:

* had a neighbor (3 houses down) forced at gunpoint back into their house, tied up, and robbed blind. All happened in broad daylight.

* had a gun-fight in the parking lot across the street from our development

* had multiple muggings and car-jackings all within close proximity of our house.

------
stretchwithme
The buildings that survive are the ones we are left to look at.

And in such a young, rapidly expanding country, a far smaller percentage of
the buildings are old, even if every one of them had survived.

------
cturner
"Even the best streets in the world's best towns can accommodate people of
various incomes."

I wonder how the author can say this with a straight face. The only way to
prevent clumping into income groups is through the dystopian planning law -
which he claims elsewhere to criticise.

If people see cheap housing near where they're friends live, they'll buy it
and convert it, and it becomes expensive housing.

~~~
Symmetry
Really? If you consider that more poeple would be living in and paying rent
for the cheap housing than for the expensive housing it isn't obvious that
this would all go one way.

I don't think that we can or should try to totally eliminate the variations in
income among neighborhoods, but we can stop passing laws that make it worse.

------
snth
One of the things the author doesn't mention is _fire_ codes. I assume this is
one of the reasons buildings are built further back from the road, and also
one of the reasons that catastrophic, city-demolishing fires are a thing of
the past in the U.S.

------
jacques_chester
Labour used to be much cheaper. The master builders could afford to build
beautiful buildings with twiddly adornments.

Where I was living earlier this year was near Guildford, in Perth, Australia.
Not far away is the old Midland Rail Yard. The site is dominated by three
giant industrial sheds built for rail engine maintenance. Internally they look
much like any 1900s factory, with brute thick walls to support fixed cranes
and fantastic natural light from 2-story wall windows and sawtooth roof
windows.

Outside the brickwork is formed into lovely arches with tasteful adornments.
All in all these utterly functional buildings are beautiful.

(Only half-decent photo I could find online:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengster/134135743/in/photostre...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengster/134135743/in/photostream/))

Today you could not justify the cost. Brickwork of that kind takes too long
and so costs serious money; windows like those allow too much heat in. So
instead we get lego buildings, giant concrete cubes without soul or feeling.

Where the money is spent these days is no longer on craftsmanship, it's on
wanktastic monuments to some puffed up architect's desire to win an
architecture award. Go find a building in your city that has won any such
award since the 60s. Dollars to donuts it is ugly and impractical.

~~~
powera
"Labour used to be much cheaper." - with 10% unemployment in the US (that's
higher if you use more accurate measures), I'm not quite sure why the reason
for this would be a lack of available labor.

~~~
kgermino
Unfortunately with modern day unions and minimum wage laws high unemployment
doesn't translate into lower wages, at least not for craftsmen.

------
Mz
Semi-abandoned dream of mine was to go into urban planning or something
related. So I have an interest in the built environment that goes back a few
years.

Surprising and eye-opening occurrence in my life: I gave up my car closing in
on three years ago. Me and my two adult sons do a lot of walking locally.
Walking has caught on in my neighborhood, in spite of a lack of a side-walks
and huge undeveloped tracts of land and other types of discouragements. With
more people walking locally, the local air is cleaner and the plant life is
healthier...etc...which seems to encourage more people to walk. The
neighborhood also seems to have gotten safer, this based on certain subjective
impressions but also on the fact that we no longer get police cars staking out
the entrance to our apartment complex, which was a routine thing when we first
lived here.

Anyway, how people behave is apparently less dependent upon the built
environment than I thought and that behavior is important in building the
fabric of community. People know each other more now and are friendlier and
the streets are safer...etc. The neighborhood has changed a good bit in the
time I have been here.

------
qaexl
Steve Blank wrote an article [http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-
darkest-men-see-th...](http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-
see-the-stars/) on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses,
particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ...
at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the
workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still
crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own
business, many people are forced to.

~~~
qaexl
Wow. Hacker News ate my text. Let's try this again.

Steve Blank wrote an article [http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-
darkest-men-see-th...](http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-
see-the-stars/) on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses,
particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ...
at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the
workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still
crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own
business, many people are forced to.

Indeed, [http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-
homeprene...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-homepreneurs)
talks about the "homepreneurs", having home-based business.

One interesting thing reading this and reading the interviews in Founders At
Work was that many of the tech founds then and the founds now say that it is
much more acceptable now to operate a business from the home than it was say,
in 1980. The idea of a garage-based business in Palo Alto is the stuff of
legends, but the reality was that in mind 1970s, 1980s, even the early 1990s,
you don't get as much credibility with a home-based business. With the number
of big IPOs and "rags-to-riches" stories, garage-based businesses are more
acceptable. So is the fact that people can rent Class-A digs to woo customers
and investors.

But think about this in the context of that Atlantic article. The article
talks about how the traditional mixed-use neighborhoods wove residential with
commercial concerns. Someone living in a traditional neighborhood could get
all of their basic living needs by walking, all within a 5 minute walk.

In other words, it -seems- that a "home-based" business is more acceptable in
the present than in the past, but dig deeper into a past when towns were
planned around neighborhoods instead of zones, and you see this is actually an
American tradition.

What's different now is that the barriers of entry are falling particularly
for web-based businesses. People outside of IT -- and even inside IT -- don't
know this, but virtualization has changed the game since 2005. In late 1990s,
the cost for setting up your server and a landline was in the tens of
thousands. In 2005, it has dropped into the thousands, and probably less. With
virtualization now, we're talking about ~$10/mth for base cost; expert labor
costs much more than the servers themselves.

Even product-based businesses operate virtually now, as described in Tim
Ferris's Four Hour Workweek. Product fulfillment can be outsourced to
competent firms. So are product design and marketing. Just-in-time inventory
has made its way to small businesses, so there isn't a need to warehouse
inventory yourself.

My point is that the numbers of people with a non-traditional job -- that is,
unless you look all the past 1920s when it was traditional to own your own
business -- can fly under the radar of zoning laws. And further, there will be
an increasing demand and pressure for traditionally-planned, neighborhood-
based communities. I don't think homepreneurs want to live in surburbia. I
have friends who drive out to the local coffee shop, to get their
socialization while "working from home". And if that coffee shop was instead a
pleasant, 5-minute walk away?

------
hsmyers
I spent almost a decade as an art major at various campus's across the US and
one of the dirty secrets was that while we put up with shit from the business
majors 'cause we knew better (we told them to try and sell their products in
plain unmarked brown paper bags), we all snickered when anyone talked about
'talent' and 'architecture'...

