
Revenge of the Suburbs - prostoalex
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/pandemic-suburbs-are-best/613300/
======
screye
> But America is not South Korea or Singapore. Americans have been running
> away from dense, vertical design for a century. Those who already prefer
> sparse, low-slung living will likely use their fear of COVID-19 to entrench
> their preference.

More like Americans were sold a very particular dream of sparse living by car
companies that later solidified with the racist/practical implications of how
inner cities were perceived.

Also, it isn't just SK or Singapore. European cities tend to abhor sprawl as
well. In some sense, it unique to the US and countries that culturally draw
from the same ford-American dream.

> The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways

The idea that suburbs are resilient to the pandemic because of the
unsustainable lack of shared spaces and inherent isolation is hilarious to me.
Historically speaking, this is a once in a century thing. It won't and should
not affect how generation defining decisions are made.

Full disclosure, there are very few things I hate as much as American suburbs
and urban sprawl.

But, those who dislike dense American cities often seem to dislike things that
have nothing to do with the density in the first place. The crime caused by
inner cities is a result of white flight and racially driven policing of the
last 50 years. The dead looking cityscape of some dense cities are a result of
terrible urban planning. (American Urban design is known to be sub-par. Most
European cities with similar constraints have implemented better and more
practical solutions)

Chasing naive single minded goals such as "more density" or "more bike lanes"
is not what freedom from suburbia looks like. Well thought-out urban design
ends up being dense, with public transportation infrastructure and
bike/walking friendly. But adding any of those things hap-hazardly to an old
system that clearly was not designed to support it is stupidity.

Hopefully people understand that it doesn't have to be a choice between
thoughtless dense urban development and Suburbia. There are other proven
options out there.

~~~
luckylion
> European cities tend to abhor sprawl as well. In some sense, it unique to
> the US and countries that culturally draw from the same ford-American dream.

That's absolutely not my experience in Germany. If they can afford it, plenty
of people move to the edge of the city or a bit outside it. They want access
to the city, but they also want a spacious garden and quiet neighbors and
don't need to live "in the middle of it" when they have children (or, at least
in my peer group, even when they don't have children but are approaching 40).

~~~
angarg12
It varies by country, for instance Spain seems more comfortable with density
than say England.

But leaving personal preferences and anecdotes aside, if we look at the data,
Europe definitely prefers density compared to the US:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/World_po...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/World_population_density_1994_-_with_equator.png)

~~~
luckylion
I wonder if it's a preference or just that there are fewer options. By US
standards, all European countries are high density, e.g. Germany with ~25% of
the US population is significantly smaller than California, maybe 5% of the
size of the US.

~~~
adventured
They're far older concentration processes, which is a factor ignored by other
comments about why. The US is still filling in, settling, its vast territory.
European territory is mostly settled, the cities are established, their
process of forming major new cities is mostly over.

In 1940 the Las Vegas metro area had only a couple tens of thousands of
people. Now it has 2.25 million - a metro larger than Slovenia, Latvia or
Estonia. In 1940 the Austin Texas metro maybe had 100k people, now it's 2.1m.
Texas of course has many examples of rapid population expansion metros, as
new, large urban or semi-urban areas get created. Utah didn't exist as a state
until 1896 and its population has increased over ten fold since then; its
population has increased 300 fold in 150 years. In the late 19th century,
Phoenix had only several thousand people, now the metro is approaching five
million (equivalent to adding an Ireland, Norway, Finland or Denmark).

Paris by amusing contrast is of course over two millennia old. European
populations have been concentrating into their cities, and emptying their
surrounding lands, for far longer than the US has existed.

------
nine_k
The problem is that the US have very few real dense cities, like what they
call a city in Europe. That is, densely packed population, densely packed
businesses, walkability, adequate public transportation that covers the entire
area, all the things that allow an urbanite to comfortably live without owning
a car, and streets are not very car-friendly anyway.

What are these cities? NYC (not only Manhattan but everywhere the subway +
buses reach), Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Seattle. Maybe a few others with
some reservations, like Washington DC or SF.

I have hard time seeing places like Houston or LA as "cities" in the same
sense; they have small downtowns and huge suburb-like agglomerations around
them, where you are either inside your house, or inside a car. Silicon Valley
seems to largely lack cities, except the ailing SF.

If you want to see what a functioning large city looks like, visit NYC, or
London, or Amsterdam, or Moscow, or Shanghai, or Singapore.

[Edited: spelling]

~~~
brnt
I've lived in Amsterdam for a decade, which I affectionately call the largest
village I've ever lived. The Netherlands has no cities of 1M+, yet is one of
the densest countries in the world. How? Its quite multi centered. There's a
lot of 50-500k towns in close vicinity, each with their own facilities and
economies. Because of proximity they're of course not independent, but they're
definitely not suburbs. There are towns you could say are suburbs, where
people usually commute by car, but somehow they're not nearly as car exclusive
of American suburbs. Maybe its worth a closer look at this.

~~~
ariwilson
How is Amsterdam different from LA? They have almost identical population
densities in their metro areas (~1000/ sq km).

~~~
ProZsolt
Amsterdam made for people(walkable, cyclable). LA made for cars(wide,
multilane roads)

------
hbosch
I have a daughter and a baby boy on the way. A few years ago we moved to a
suburb (a ferry ride away and then some, _not_ Bainbridge) of Seattle, and I'm
glad we did. The commute is pretty long when I have to go into the office, but
thanks(?) to COVID my employer now has a true WFH-friendly infrastructure and
a management team that no longer fears remote productivity. I love gardening
and walking down to a relatively quiet waterfront, my little downtown, and
seeing my kids run around in the yard safely knowing we are far from the
burning cop cars of Seattle just a few weeks ago.

Living in Queen Anne isn't much different, it's just 10x more expensive and
you have a couple more restaurants. We manage just fine.

~~~
zhdc1
This COVID-19 induced remote work experiment has really been interesting.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the IT/software revolution was just how much
industry centralization (e.g., Silicon Valley, Seattle, and later San
Francisco/Shanghai/Paris/etc...) impacted competitiveness & employee wages.

It should have been the opposite - the diffusion of communication
infrastructure (and information in general) should have made it easier for
companies to outsource work to cheaper locations. This turned out to not be
the case, at least in software, for a number of reasons - one of the main ones
being that high performing employees on the whole prefer living in and around
convenient urban locations.

Now that everyone has had a taste of remote work, it will be interesting to
see if this trend reverses.

------
jseliger
Is the pandemic, or is it the fact that exclusionary zoning has dramatically
raised the cost of housing in many cities:
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/ne...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-
hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html), and those
costs are only worth bearing if the cultural and social amenities are also
available? Without liberalizing urban zoning, it's hard to say.

~~~
mmm_grayons
Preferences are almost certainly a factor. I live in Houston, where we don't
have zoning, yet it's specifically cited (and I can confirm) that the vast
majority of residents live in suburbs. The article itself acknowledges that,
"Americans have been running away from dense, vertical design for a century."
People don't want to live in small spaces with close neighbors, or at least, I
don't. I don't see the appeal of going to a restaurant on foot given that I
never (or very seldom) eat out. Same thing for coffee. I don't shop except for
occasional online purchases, and never "go shopping" as many are wont to do.
Just about the only things I do are go to the office (which was at least
partially virtual, even before corona) and occasionally drive to a business
function or symphony performance. Living in an urban area simply holds no
appeal for me, or at least, I don't see any appeal. While I can't be sure as
to everyone's reasons, it appears others may feel similarly.

As an aside, the article refers to "the suburban wine room." I have yet to see
someone with a "wine room"; is this commonplace? A regional difference,
perhaps? It also refers to "his-and-hers walk-in closets"; I don't know any
guy with his own walk-in closet excepting those that live in apartments that
came with one.

~~~
bobthepanda
> I live in Houston, where we don't have zoning, yet it's specifically cited
> (and I can confirm) that the vast majority of residents live in suburbs.

Houston doesn't have _explicit_ zoning, which is true, but this doesn't mean
that it's necessarily any easier to build dense housing if that's what the
market demands.

\- Deed restrictions effectively work as zoning by limiting what a given
parcel can't be developed into, and they are city enforced; this restricts
dense development, particularly in wealthy, high-amenity, high-convenience
neighborhoods that might otherwise be more densely developed by natural
forces.

\- While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it _does_ mandate a
minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes.
Mandated parking will drive up the cost of dense development because the
minimums are set very high, and it means you either have to give over valuable
floor space for parking, you have to build very expensive underground or
structured parking, or a combination of the two. By indirectly driving up the
cost of dense development, minimum parking regulations makes less of it pencil
out.

If dense living was not in demand and undersupplied (which I believe it is),
dense apartments would not fetch more per sq ft than a house in a low density
suburb, at least not successfully.

~~~
marcusverus
>While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum
amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes.

This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US
and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses
1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.

Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful
externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any
similarly sized US city.

~~~
bluGill
That is also the cause of the lack of good public transportation. You can't
have good public transportation when there is so much space dedicated to
parking

~~~
mmm_grayons
It's pretty hard to do good public transportation in a place like Houston.
I've had forty-mile commutes in the past, and once you get that far out, you
get that nasty superlinear expansion of area covered. The closest Houston
could ever get is park-and-ride, i.e. re-locating the sea of asphalt, because
buses are too dang slow. Not to mention walking is absolute misery due to
weather from May to September.

~~~
bobthepanda
What the parent comment is saying doesn't disagree with this statement, but
rather that this is self-inflicted by the chicken-and-egg nature of "we need
more parking". The requirement for parking is what causes Houston to consider
40+ mile commutes normal, because the need for parking physically pushes uses
further away from each other, making transit and walking less attractive,
driving people into cars, and thus requiring ever more parking.

------
jmspring
Bay Area born and raised, left 3.5 years ago.

Grew up in the East Bay in the mid/late 80s and was fortunate to get to run
around from Pleasanton to Oakland/Berkeley and the city (SF). Traffic wasn't
that bad.

Went to UC Santa Cruz for college (BA/BS -> ABD w/ MS in Comp Eng) and still
was lucky to get up and enjoy things through the 90s.

2000s rolled around, traffic increased, going to the city (SF) wasn't as fun.
The influx of people changed the nature of long time favorites (many no longer
around.

That influx and the increase in population has seen long time restaurants
close (rezoning - especially in places like Mountain View.

The HN take is "more density", "do away with rules", but there is a lack of
respect for the history, the restaurants and markets pushed out because FB
needed yet another low density campus off of El Camino and Rengstorff.

From the late 90s through the 2000s, the Bay Area changed. The influx of
people from other areas, the demands of tech, etc have ruined it - at least
for me. A side interest is preserving history, and Santa Clara County is
pretty gungho about making sure most of that is buried due to the mighty
dollar.

Where I am now, it's a place. It's not home for the future, but in the
mountains, mostly quiet, and I have fiber. I'm privileged in that regard. And
my job allows for such.

~~~
advertiser
Now this is just an opinion and no doubt others will disagree but I think a
very similar thing is happening or has already happened in Seattle.

The dynamics have been driven by "tech", namely you-know-who, named after
rainforest in South America nd their newly-minted cloud computing competitors.

Influx of people from other areas, both within US and international. "More
density" and "do away with rules".

Another comment in this thread actually proposes the high rents are being
driven by zoning. I find that hard to swallow. People in both commercial and
residential real estate tell us about demand that is by and large coming from
one general source: "tech". This is what has driven the rates higher.

I do not want to sound like another person looking to take jabs at the tech
industry however I think some of the folks coming into these places for these
jobs lack a certain appreciation for what makes these places special. To put
it bluntly their standards are lower. The market has reponded and is giving
them want they want; the number of city residences being built for rainforest
workers is staggering. Yet I think we are losing something in the process and
I am not sure the people moving in really have an appreciation for what is
being lost. We cannot expect them to as they are new to the area.

~~~
ng12
Yeah, same thing happened in New York. All these people moved in without any
respect for what NYC is really about -- Dutch farming.

~~~
advertiser
I have Dutch ancestry, my ancestors were some of the first generations to
settle in NY and I grew up there. Truth is that those generations of
immigrants that came before the "tech workers" do have respect for what NYC is
really about. They made NYC what it is. Just another opinion.

~~~
ng12
A part of what it is, yes. But that's the beauty of it: cities are constantly
changing and building upon what came before. It's what makes them cities and
not forgotten backwaters.

~~~
advertiser
I have no opinion against change, per se. I think that is an unfair and
incorrect reframing of someone's opinion. It is only the nature of certain
changes I have an opinion about. It is like if someone has opinion about X, a
single example of how to implement Y, and then someone else accuses them of
being "against Y". Ridiculous.

~~~
bJGVygG7MQVF8c
Agreed. "Change is good, actually" is vacuous.

~~~
ng12
"Change is good" is not what I'm trying to say. The point is that change is a
fundamental attribute of cities. Trying to claim that a city should retain the
characteristics it had when you moved there flies in the face of all the
change that took place to make it that way that way. The only thing you can do
is lean into the change and try to steer it in positive directions.

I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a fair chance GP was somebody else's
version of a "techie" when they moved to Seattle. Most likely that someone
else was equally salty about the changing demographics.

------
jackcosgrove
The article itself states that a majority of the US population lives in
suburbs, and a supermajority lives in suburban built environments, in central
city and suburbs alike.

How could living in the suburbs be so terrible if a supermajority of people
live in detached single family homes in residential neighborhoods with
suburban style zoning? Are all of these people imprisoned against their will?

~~~
Drunk_Engineer
In many cases, they are "imprisoned" against their will because zoning does
not permit any other kind of development. The other problem is they are not
paying the full cost of the suburban lifestyle. It is only sustainable through
huge government subsidies.

~~~
Thorrez
> The other problem is they are not paying the full cost of the suburban
> lifestyle. It is only sustainable through huge government subsidies.

They're paying for it with taxes right? Or are the minority of people living
in dense cities paying these huge subsidies for the supermajority in the
suburbs?

------
ACow_Adonis
I live in an 80 sqm apartment within walking distance of our city core. Its a
historical mix of new medium-rise apartments, old Victorians, and workers
cottages with several public transport lines running through it. Traffic is
currently limited to 30kmh on my streets.

What the shut-downs has revealed to me is not "the revenge" of the suburbs,
but a foisting of suburban lifestyle onto us against our will. Our libraries
were shut, our museums, our parks, our shops, our pools. There was no option
to accept or manage the risks locally. Its important to remember, the disease
didn't do this to us, this was a political response to it, which is a policy
choice, not a certainty.

Meanwhile, the centres of suburban life were left comparatively untouched:
shopping malls, big corporate supermarkets, etc, and people drove there and
mixed and shopped almost like there was no pandemic. Again, the disease didn't
do this, people did. policy did.

In my city, where have the clusters of the disease have been: suburbs. some of
that is definitely due to the shutting of the city, but policy has been
enacted under the assumption that suburban life is the only life.

We just had a slight tightening of conditions because of a (very small) rise
in cases: why? two reasons, putting returning travellers in cbd hotels as part
of quarantine, and parties and socialising amongst known infected cases in...
you guessed it, suburbia. Apparently, because of this, cafes and businesses in
the inner city need to be further restrained for another 3 weeks.

for me, the pandemic simply accentuated everything wrong with the suburban
lifestyle (because I'm now forced to live it while my facilities are shut) and
I'll continue to wait and lobby for the return of our actual (and personally,
better) life.

~~~
babesh
Is the disease here city politics and government? Suburban governments seem
more responsive to citizenry?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I think this may be a US political thing.

there's no love of local politics here, but I'm not aware of any feeling that
suburban/urban councils/local area governments are inherently
superior/inferior to the others.

though (obviously?) I like the services my local government provides, here
transport, health and education are state level decisions...

~~~
classichasclass
Are you in Australia? LGAs aren't something many U.S. residents refer to.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
yes, down under :)

~~~
tomhoward
It's probably worth noting that the kind suburbia you're talking about, which
sounds like Melbourne (same as me) according to your top comment, is different
to what is meant by suburbia in the U.S. and thus in the article.

Melbourne's suburbia, where the latest outbreaks have happened, is all part of
Melbourne's urban sprawl - i.e., there are no unpopulated gaps between the
inner urban area and these suburbs. And the pattern of spread reflects that;
cases that begin as returning international travellers, transmitting it to
hotel workers, who then take it back to their neighbourhoods further out but
still part of the same metropolis. Then families intermingle with others just
a few localities away, and off it goes.

Suburbs in the U.S. are more separate from the main urban centres, and are
more self-contained, so there's less intermingling of people from one town to
another. They're more like what we think of as rural cities like Ballarat,
Geelong, Shepparton, etc.

In the past few years my partner and I moved out of inner Melbourne to the
Mornington Peninsula to be closer nature and have more space for raising a
family, and this feels more like the suburbia of the U.S., with localities
like Frankston, Mt Eliza, Mornington and the towns further down all being
quite spread out.

And so far, touch wood, the state of viral spread bears this out, with no new
cases reported for a few weeks in either Frankston City or MP Shire, and
indeed very few cases since the initial wave in March, which was mostly
returned travellers. That said, Frankston is not insulated from the rest of
Melbourne and is right next to Casey, where there are new cases, and the
Peninsula gets lots of visitors from Melbourne, so there's still plenty of
risk. (Edit: spoke too soon – one new case in MP Shire today, sigh.)

------
bane
Like anyplace, suburbs can be great or suck.

My last home (detached house) was a in very suburban mega development (about
20k people), but was walking distance to public transit (commuter bus),
movies, gym, library, doctors, grocery, dentists, something like 15 different
restaurants from fast food to high-end, coffee shop, and so on. It has
something like 20 miles of trials, lots of green space, pools and so on. It
wasn't a "downtown" but a designed commercial space in the middle of the
development that made it pretty nice to live there. Anywhere outside of the
development was decidedly not walkable, but not a terrible drive. While
sections have very similar looking houses, there's lot of mixed sections with
entirely different architecture making it not _too_ boring.

I moved a couple years ago to a new place further in towards a major city, but
in another, but much older, mega development (about 60k people). It's
higher/mixed density. There's a city bus a 2-3 minute walk from my detached
house which connects to the subway, I can walk to work (it's about 3 miles
away) and a bit of shopping and dining within a couple easy 2 mile walks.
There's several shopping areas scattered around, pools, and so on, and a
reasonably large and growing urban core maybe 4 miles away, I usually drive to
it, but I could probably take the bus. It was also designed with intense tree
cover in mind and most of the area is absolutely bursting in mature trees and
nature (including wildlife!). There's also an extensive trail system that
provides relatively easy transit around all this stuff for walkers, hikers,
bikers, and so on. Homes were built in an impossible number of styles in a
wide mix of densities.

My point is, suburbs _can_ be great places to live. Just like there are
terrible suburbs, there's terrible urban areas as well -- not everywhere is
Manhattan or San Francisco. But it doesn't mean they _all_ suck. There's
definitely a movement to make these areas more livable and to learn lessons
from the past.

------
curuinor
Every East Asian polity with 50-story soulless concrete apartment buildings is
in the middle of successfully beating it back, so really American cities are
_not dense enough_

~~~
greggman3
Yes, it sure is confusing why say NYC had a times 5000-6000 new cases a day
and yet Tokyo, a city with 2-3x more people and way more crowded trains and
offices and stores never had more than 200 a day.

[https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page](https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page)

[https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en](https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en)

People come up with all kinds of theories but none of them seem to fit. One
theory, Japanese wear masks. They didn't until the lockdown which was late.
They've mostly unlocked now and restaurants seem relatively busy. Of course
(almost) everyone is still wearing a mask and lots of precautions are in place
but at a glance seeing the still crowded trains and now crowded restaurants
it's hard to figure out why the numbers stay so low.

Some people claim not enough testing but if that's all it was there would
still be a death rate climb and arguably an ICU overflow and that hasn't
happened either.

~~~
harpratap
> One theory, Japanese wear masks. They didn't until the lockdown which was
> late

This is untrue. People in East Asia wear masks a lot more than any place else
even without a pandemic. I started seeing a lot of masks in Tokyo in January
itself. Softbank tested all their employees and the ones who were working in
shops had less infections than the ones who worked at home, even though the
number of people WFH were much lower than ones who worked in shops. Which
gives a very solid backing to the theory that masks + personal hygiene is
enough to keep this pandemic under control.

Source for the softbank tests -
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/SoftBank-
condu...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/SoftBank-
conducts-44-000-antibody-tests-0.43-come-back-positive)

~~~
greggman3
It's not untrue. I've lived in Japan 14 years. I have pictures from late March
of people out and about without masks. Sure, it was not uncommon to see a few
people wearing masks in Asia (and Japan) before the epidemic but it was not
remotely everyone at any time until the lockdown in April. Usually an average
train of 200 people might have 10-20 people with masks on (before the
lockdown)

Here's pictures March 24th (and one in late Jan which shows zero masks)

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/aUWB5YB6vBnjZk8j6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/aUWB5YB6vBnjZk8j6)

So no, it's not because Japanese wear masks. I'm not saying that doesn't help
but it's clearly not enough given how crowded the trains are and how late it
was until everyone started wearing them

~~~
harpratap
So how else do you explain SoftBank's testing results? The testing pool is
large enough to not be an outlier, everything else was exactly the same for
all their employees - their genetic pool, healthcare system, their cultural
habits. The only difference was their level of alertness to personal hygiene.
People working in stores were extra cautious of everything while who WFH were
laid back and might have ended up slipping up more often, hence the higher
cases.

------
dangus
This is just another article that covers far too many topics all at once.

It says a lot while saying nothing.

And all the articles about COVID-19 will look silly in 3-5 years when it’s
entirely not a concern. Predicting which aspects of life will stick as “the
new normal” is a fools errand.

All the benefits of suburbia in the article are essentially negated by the
drawbacks that the article mentions: suburbia sucks wealth away because the
infrastructure costs too much to sustain. There really isn’t any way to get
around that huge flaw.

~~~
radomysisky
> suburbia sucks wealth away because the infrastructure costs too much to
> sustain

While cost to sustain is relatively static, the price homeowners are willing
to endure for the upsides of suburbia are dynamic.

In a world plagued by pandemics and social unrest, that price continues to
rise. Remote work will only accelerate this trend.

~~~
dangus
It sucks wealth away because American towns have an addiction to using bond
money to pay for infrastructure maintenance - infrastructure that will need to
be replaced again before the bond is paid off.

They also have a habit of greenlighting development where the builders pay to
build the roads and sewers that the town then takes over long term maintenance
for, without accounting for the wealth generation of those properties being
unable to pay for them.

Part 3 of “the growth Ponzi scheme” illustrates this well:

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/15/the-growth-
pon...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/15/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-
part-3.html)

Now, I also wouldn’t take Stong Towns as gospel but it’s not hard to look
around and find crumbling American suburbs. Even the “nice” suburbs are
drowning in debt despite good appearances.

And now, you’ve got millennials who are figuring out that no, they don’t need
to own two cars (debt on wheels) and hoard _stuff_ like their parents did.
Millennials are urbanizing at a rapid rate and it is not slowing down since
they aren’t universally moving to the suburbs once they have (a smaller
quantity of) kids like their parents did.

The boomer generation grew up in an era of crime-laden cities that simply
doesn’t exist anymore and may never again exist. Without the inner city crime
of previous decades one has to ask what suburban life actually gets you in
comparison.

------
blahbhthrow3748
I live in a small semi-detached house that's walkable to the downtown of our
city. I can bike to dozens different places to get take-out, we have a small
private back garden where we can host guests, and we have enough space for two
of us to work from home in privacy. We also actually see our neighbors outside
every evening when we walk around.

There's definitely an in-between, medium density option that this article
seems to ignore in favor of focusing on car-focused, isolated suburbs where
everyone had 5 bedrooms and a pool.

~~~
mason55
That’s exactly what I want except where I am the schools are all awful for any
area with houses like that. So either move to car-centric suburbs or add
another $20k+ per year to send two kids to decent private schools.

~~~
war1025
I wonder what would happen if well-off folks worked at improving public
schools rather than fleeing to private institutions.

Granted, I live in the midwest where public schools are, as a general rule,
pretty good. One of the reasons we moved to the town we did though is that
they have a unified school system. I heard too many of my more well-off
acquaintances making offhand comments amounting to "oh, you don't want to move
there. They go to the poor people school."

If you think good schools are a public good, put your family where your mouth
is.

~~~
greggman3
Unfortunately there is no incentive to wait. I would expect most people would
like public schools to be better but have no expectation they can influence
them to be better in time for their kids to benefit so they'd separate the two
issues. (1) send your kids to private school so you're not sacrificing them on
principle (2) push for better public schools.

I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money.
IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger
issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty
and all the problems that come with it.

~~~
eyerony
> I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money.

IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful
than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who
weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.

Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school
good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering
thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own
problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even
farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).

Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it
would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off
parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-
enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd
isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban
schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well
even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that
would be acceptable.

------
vmception
tl;dr people have been independently railing on the suburbs for centuries, but
because they don't all live in dense urban environments they don't know what
they are talking about?

or because the good thing about cities was removed and now suburbs compensate
by being the exact same drab places as they were, but nothing more alluring
exists currently?

what people like about cities, and what they hate about suburbs still exists.
the former will just have to be read about in a book.

