Platy

I like the old style "streetcar suburbs". Detached houses with enough of a yard for a little garden and for small kids to play in. A neighborhood park, schools and a retail area you can walk or bike to. A train station nearby that connects to employment and the other nearby neighborhoods. I think a fair number of people could be very happy there.

gwd

Its logically impossible to have everyone spread out and everything close. I live in the densest part of the city and have a situation like Roody, but really like living in an apartment. There are some houses with yards in my ward but if all of us vertical people were in houses with yards we'd no longer be within walking distance of everything. It just so happens that the densest part of DC abuts a national park with all the wildlife like Roody describes. If we all spread out into houses with yards the wildlife would have to go. My apartment is quiet and more room than I need, I don't feel vertical or ghettoish or stacked up or crowded. When I drove a car and lived in the suburbs I felt more constrained by other people's behavior stuck in traffic. Other people don't seem to interfere with me as much without a car. If I want to spend time in the woods I do so. I can put my camping gear on my bike and go out in nature for many days staying at a different campsite each night. I can bike out to farms or walk to community gardens if I want to raise vegetables. The thing is if all the apartment dwellers were forced into single family homes the region would be a mess. I get the feeling that apartment living is stigmatized by real estate agents. The coarse language I hear from suburbanites disparaging city living doesn't match my experience. It seems like they have to have some bad fantasy about life in the city to make their lives stuck in traffic not seem so stupid.

Roody

Does anybody know, in fact, where most Americans actually live? City? Inner suburbs? Sprawlville?

How does this compare with other countries?

Where do we find these figures? Rural vs. urban is easy to find, but where are more detailed figures?

gwd

I used to live in such a neighborhood. You can still see that some of the houses used to be stores- with apartments above. The street car went to DC but many of the people who lived in the neighborhood when it was built also worked in the nearby rail yard. The rail yard is now a mall. The apartment blocks from the streetcar days are just two stories. The streetcars are gone, people drive to the mall so the small shops are gone. Many of the houses with yards are really sets of apartments with shared yards. Some of my neighbors were car free when I lived there. Where I live now with higher density has green space and safe places for kids but is much more convenient, many more choices for anything you want to do. My current neighborhood also used to have street cars.

Elkhound

Close. "Infill." When I lived in Charlotte, there were lots of bits of undeveloped land right in the city; one of the big things to controll sprawl was to encourage building housing developments on these bits. Some people objected because it cut down on the green space in the city, but with more people moving to the area, they have to live somewhere, and better infill than sprawl, no?

burbankbiker

This is the world Krugman is referring to in his article.



The train station outside of Upsala, Sweden is like nothing my American brain can comprehend. In fact, this picture is only able to capture a fraction of the image. Like a postcard of the grand canyon, one must realize that this scene continues to the left and right of this frame. Thousands of bikes... all commuters who have ridden to take the train into Stockholm. It's a 50 mile train ride that costs less than my 2 mile ride on BART into downtown San Francisco. Tens of thousands of Uppsalans commute this way to their jobs. Each bike parked here on any given weekday represents a likely car in our commuting system. Count each saddle you can see and multiply that number by 12,000. That's the pounds of CO2 that's not being emitted by these people!

Despite what some people have said in this thread, I don't think that it's a seismic shift needed to accomplish this lifestyle in the states. After all, the suburbs are a post WWII concept. For thousands of years people lived in dense clusters because it was a survival benefit. For only 60 years we've been spreading out. It shouldn't be that hard to re-contract.

JeffS

Are you off your meds again?

Are you seriously advocating increased sprawl as the solution to sprawl?
It probably will continue in this direction, but not because it makes sense, but because the "highly skilled and educated" are a little too attached to their cars, and a little too scared of brown skin.

maddyfish

^^^Well there's a racist view for you. No I'm not advocating it. I am pointing out what is already happening. 20 years ago, they'd just build a subdivision. Now, it is planned with retail, offices, and everything right there. Already happening.

burbankbiker

20 years ago they'd build a strip mall nearby. The aesthetic has changed but it's largely still the same band-aid solution.

The problem with locating "offices" near each suburban subdivision is that you're effectively creating a micro version of "industry towns." When the big steel plant in Bugaboo, OH closes... all the workers in the town are doomed. So if the proposed solution to sprawl's finite ability to continue is to locate a few offices near each subdivision, people will be similarly vulnerable to the continued success of those limited businesses.

Likewise, the solution to build more grocery stores every "3 miles" may fix the consumer side of the equation but it vastly complicates the supplier side of the equation. More end points for distribution means more trucks, more driving, more gas, more overhead to run more stores, more wholesale cost, higher food prices... and ultimately we end up paying for it anyway.

TuckertonRR

I currently live in such an area. The towns were built along the streetcar line. Fortunately, it still runs. the development patterns I can see have somewhat changed over the years, but all the basics (food, libraries, hospital, etc. are pretty much within a 1/2 hr walking distance.

roseskunk

there are some interesting alternatives to the traditional suburb. her's one that i used to photograph.

https://www.prairiecrossing.com/pc/site/index.html

of course they're not for everyone, but i dare say that they attempt to address issues like commuting and cookie-cutter lawns.

FXjohn

depends on what your definition of "everything" is.

I like having wildlife and a garden on my property. maybe you don't care about stuff like that.

gwd

Um, everything I walk to now. Some of it would have to be located farther away for some people in the neighborhood if we all lived in houses with yards.

I do have wildlife and a garden on my property, but wouldn't mind if I had to walk to the park to see it. I keep my binoculars out to check out the birds in the trees outside my window. I have to say that I see more wildlife in the city than in the suburbs. I think it is the park that attracts the coyote, fox, deer, hawk, raccoons, humming birds. I'm always seeing new birds, like I said in an earlier post this week I've been watching a new type of finch this year. Of course the neighborhood has the feral cats and rats and squirrels. It is artificial wildlife but the national zoo is so close I hear the gibbons in the morning and the big cats at feeding time. Even without the zoo with the park so close I'm probably regularly exposed to a greater variety of wildlife than most suburban folk. The zoo also has free concerts in summer time during which the zoo volunteers come out with gentle animals to show the kids. By building up, our building has a nice big lot so if I want to get into landscaping I can- the landscape committee is always looking for people. Besides the lot we have a roof deck where I'm allowed to grow anything I want within the law. A few years ago some joker had cannabis up there but we frown on that. Its beautiful. I attached a photo I took on my ride home from work, in the middle of the city, to prove that I don't need to go far to see wildlife.

cooker

You're missing the concept of density. In an older urban setting with mixed single family housing, apartments and businesses, the scale is walkable, or bikeable and even public transit can pretty much sustain itself from fares.

No amount of redistribution of industry and retail across suburbia is going to duplicate that efficiency. There may be nodules of suburban neighbourhoods that successfully intensify with residential infill and attract industry and retail, but many others are at risk of becoming rundown slums.

cooker

You're a bit unique in that you can afford to live miles from work, or maybe you do some work from home, but a large proportion of suburban or exurban dwellers are at risk of severe transportion woes, since they bought without regard for future gas prices.

cooker

All the more reason for people like Krugman to help them anticipate that future. After all, the free market works best if everyone has access to good information.

FXjohn

hey nice concrete in that pic. I hope all that stuff you walk to makes you happy, I certainly enjoy the woods garden and lake i walk to

Platy

Krugman's column was apparently an elaboration of an identically titled blog posting he made last week. There were 92 comments. I don't know how severely they were moderated, but every single one of the comments was interesting, incisive and well reasoned. Maybe 4-5 of them were in outright disagreement. All were polite.

I did get the sense that car free living was being discussed as a remote theoretical possibility by most of the commenters. It could be that some of the heated discussions we have here at the LCF forum revolve around the more practical day to day car free issues that come up in real life.

Stranded in Suburbia (NY Times blog posting)

burbankbiker

An odd thing to mention with sarcastic antipathy on a biking forum.

FXjohn

why? you don't have to be surrounded by concrete to ride a bicycle.

Roody

The city mouse/country mouse argument seems pretty farfetched to me. Urban, suburban, rural--all three have a long way to go before they can be considered sustainable. No matter where we happen to live, I think most of us are doing what we can to move our own lives and our communities in the right direction.

Dahon.Steve

San Francisco is one of the few places I would move if housing costs weren't so high.

Roody

I grew up in a planned community--Highland Park, Michigan, less than a mile from the world's first auto assembly line. Highland Park was rural when Henry Ford built his plant, and Ford's engineers pretty much designed the new city. Ironically, they designed it as practically a carfree suburb. Most of the houses were within walking distance of the plant. There was a shopping district that ran down the central avenue, so most homes were less than 3 or 4 blocks from a store. Schools were built every few blocks. The entire city was only about a mile square. It used to be one of the most desirable locations in the entire country.

I've often thought that this suburb, built by Henry Ford, could serve as a template for the carfree suburbs of the future.

Lamplight

It is indeed. In fact, what you described could be many places here in middle Tennessee. My town has about 100,000 people, and there are two super Walmarts, six Krogers, at least one Food Lion, three or four Publix, and probably a couple I'm forgetting. There are at least 400 restaurants here, and countless other stores, all spread out everywhere. One part of town, which my brother and I call "The Ninth Circle" is basically every car free person's worst nightmare. Out of control traffic, vast, miserable parking lots, and thousands and thousands of people trying to drive to the next restaurant or clothing store as quickly as possible so they can spend, spend, spend. That is the worst of my town.

The good part is, of course, older. We have a wonderful downtown area, with a convenient, grid-like street pattern, sidewalks, beautiful old houses, quite a few shops and businesses, and even a small grocery store. It's so much different you'd swear it wasn't the same town. I currently live closer to "The Ninth Circle", but I'm remodeling a house nearer to the good part. Yes, I'll have a yard (I currently live in an apartment), but I plan to grow as much of my own food as possible. Also, the house is pretty small (1000 Sq Ft) and older (mid 1940s). It has no insulation in the walls, yet it's cooler in the summer than my apartment (assuming I don't have the a/c on) which is great. I'll be less than a mile from the grocery store, a couple of miles from the doctor and dentist, same for the hospital, less than a mile from plenty of restaurants (with over 400, how could I not be?), and less than a mile from the bank, hardware store, and department store, less than a mile from the MUP, which I can take to get to parks and woods. So I'll have a reasonable house and a yard/garden, but still be in the middle of town. I can't wait.

burbankbiker

Yeah, housing costs are high but for us we've balanced it from where we were living (Los Angeles, which isn't much lower anyway). We're selling the car and saving almost 200 a month in insurance, about 150 a month in gas, and around 50 bucks a month in maintenance (if you spread annual maintenance costs throughout the year). The rent we're paying here is equal to the amount we had just learned our apartment in LA was about to rise to. And because most of SF is rent control (our apartment is), the cost is going to stay relatively manageable. We calculated it very carefully before we moved and we've worked it out so that we're actually going to be experiencing a next increase in disposable income from moving up here, despite certain costs going up.

I say "going to" because we're still carrying the car insurance bill until we can sell the car.