Yes, you pay more for less in terms of space, that’s not what you are paying for, but you also tend to earn more. When people move to the suburbs they generally are not moving there to save money, they are doing it to get a bigger house. The concept of ‘more’ is related almost entirely to physical space as there are plenty of other things there are ‘more’ of in the city than in the suburbs, museums and other amenities. You also have to have a car in the suburbs so that’s an added expense, if you commute to the city you have to pay for gas/toll/upkeep. Very few people move to the suburbs to start renting so they have a mortgage, it largely evens out, but you have more square feet.
I’ve never known someone to move to the suburbs because it’s cheaper, unless of course they are also moving their career. Commuting into the city is expensive.
I don’t accept that premise at all, that premise is morally and ethically bankrupt. Monetary expenditure and environmental impact are not causally linked in any way.
Yeah, how you arrive at this conclusion is completely counter-intuitive, and well, it’s just simply wrong. The carbon footprint of your average New Yorker is far lower than your average suburban dweller.
Your arguments don’t seem to be based on “city-dweller” versus “surburbanite” but “New Yorker” versus “someone who lives way out in the sticks.”
Depending on the city/suburb and the “more” you talk about, there’s “more” in the suburbs. Also, not every city has a world class public transportation system that makes a car unneeded. In fact, New York (and Chicago and San Francisco) is one of the few cities where a car is not required.
Also, suburban living in a house is substantially cheaper than apartment living in a city. Because when I sell my suburban house I will get back a considerable amount of money whereas when I moved from apartment to apartment, I had nothing to show for it but an aching back from moving my heavy shit.
No, I was thinking New Yorker vs someone who lives in New Jersey actually.
No, not every city that’s true. But this thread is more specifically about sprawl than it is about suburbs. The sprawl is the thing that is the problem. Jersey City and Newark are suburbs of New York that have great public transit.
Right, and as I have said many times the money is irrelevant to the issue. But what you are saying makes no sense as you can own an apartment and resell it too. Ownership is not a unique property of the suburbs.
True, but in my experience buying an apartment is a rare thing outside the largest of cities. I’m not sure how that would help someone who wants to live in the city of Albany versus the suburbs of Albany. Or does only New York City count as a “city” since so many people feel the need to call it The City.
As for sprawl, again, NYC is a special case and comparing it to a person’s experiences in any other city (save maybe Chicago) is an idiotic exercise at best.
Well, we are talking about various cities, and I tried to make the distinction between city and suburb before basing our definitions on density. Albany certainly is a city, but there are plenty of suburbs of New York City that are both more expensive and more dense than Albany.
We can talk about Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Albuquerque, Denver or Seattle too. This thread is about sprawl, and New York City just happens to sit at the pinnacle of one side of the spectrum. It is the ideal for efficient city planning in this nation. If anyone wants to give specifics on other locations I’m more than interested in hearing them rather than dealing with these vague generalities such as ‘suburbs’ or ‘city’, as Suburbs of NYC are more densely populated than cities in the rest of the nation. I grew up in Albuquerque and the entire city is more closely related to your average eastern suburb in terms of density than is a New York suburb.
The problem is that a lot of people don’t look at sprawl as a bad thing in and of itself. It’s a wholly individual situation for every city/suburb.
Look at my stomping grounds, Monroe County in New York. I can get from the edge of the county to the heart of downtown Rochester in 20 minutes. On my way I will pass a variety of big box stores, specialty shops and attractions (many of them in the burbs). No amount of sprawl or urban planning would change the fact that even people who live and work in the city require a car to get around. This is due just as much to the horrible winters we get as whether or not things are sprawled.
On top of that, many of the individual suburbs are self-sufficient to the point that they don’t need the city for anything. Yes, you’ll need a car, but there is no reason to go to the city unless you have a specific destination in mind.
Cities are extremely efficient in their use of land. People are willing to pay higher prices for less space to live in Manhattan because it is so desireable to live there. You can have a thousand people living on the same footprint as several McMansion yards.
“Efficent”, however, does not mean “ideal”. People require a certain amount of space to be happy. And they like looking at nature, not concrete.
I think there is also such a thing as “too dense”. At what point do you lose efficiencies by having so many people crammed on top of each other?
Small town actually 15 miles one way. Housing is just out of site.
The closest ‘city’ to me by most peoples standards is 100 miles away.
There are lots of issues here. How about pets? I know some people have dogs in the city, but I simply would not do it with out a house and yard. Not that I would ever live in an apartment or condo anyway.
I have a 2 bdrm, 2 bath house on 2 acres. To get something similar in town but on a small 1/8-1/4 acre lot would triple my mortgage. And I would still need a car anyway.
Well, the air pollution jury is still out, it seems, and that’s not something they pay for at all. That’s what makes it an externality. Ditto for loss of agricultural land and natural habitat.
The inefficiencies of cities has everything to do with it. It means there is less money available for technological advancement such as solar cells which couldn’t be used effectively in the city anyway because there isn’t enough roof space to go around. In the suburbs you can build self sustaining housing or retrofit older homes. With an individual house and land you can install geothermal systems for heating/air conditioning, grow your own food, and plant trees to your hearts content.
You need a cite that says living around tree’s is more environmentally sound than living in a concrete sandwich? How much co2 does concrete remove and how much oxygen does it produce? How many degree’s will concrete lower the surrounding temperature?
Except ‘inefficiencies of cities’ is an oxymoron. Cities are MORE efficient than suburbs as has been amply explained. The idea that cities don’t have enough space for solar panels is ludicrous. But yes, if your systems were implemented you could do that. Again i am not saying we shouldn’t have suburbs, just that I wish there were more ‘town center’ model suburbs and less sprawl malls.
No, that’s not what I asked for a cite for. If there were fewer suburbs there would be more trees in general all over the world. Besides where I live there are a lot of trees and I live in Manhattan.
Your idea that it requires more energy to cool off an apartment is off-base. First of all the temperature difference between Manhattan and New Jersey is only a couple of degrees, so it’s not like we are talking about orders of magnitude here. And the average apartment in Manhattan is much smaller than the average house in New Jersey, plus we don’t have cars with the AC running.
Is it more environmentally sound to have 100 familes spread over several square miles on in one 25 story appartment building? What is the area of concrete used to pave the parking lots, roads and driveways for the spread out families compared to the single building? Is it better to build 100 self contained homes or one large self contained building?
IOW, what would happen if you took the population of New York City and spread them all out in single-family suburban homes?
There is also a difference between what is sound for the environment as a whole vs what is good for the local environment
I don’t think its ludicrous. Where are you going to put solar panels in apartments and where are the storage batteries going? The roof would serve the top floor assuming there was enough closet space for the batteries.
I have the advantage of land which means I can tap into geothermal, solar, and wind. My car is not running the air conditioner now but your buses are which are running 24/7 whether they are occupied or not. The difference between a city and a suburb in terms of traffic is significant and it shows up in air quality. Traffic congestion means poorer gas mileage and that is made worse with road construction. You close a street in New York and traffic just backs up more. Shut a street down in a residential area and nobody notices it.
The advantages of living in the suburbs are many:
A: significantly increased level of self reliance. We can power our houses with solar panels, store the energy, and use geothermal compressors for efficient cooling/heating. We can grow our own food, pump our own water, and produce electricity with generators in an emergency. As homeowners, we have the ability to store the tools and raw supplies necessary to make repairs.
B: significant increase in green space. Our lawns, gardens and other greenery support a more civilized and environmentally friendly living space. Our tree’s are full of birds and squirrels and they produce more oxygen per acre than any apartment/tree ratio. If you want to visit a park that’s fine but our yards are already green spaces. We don’t have to travel to get away from it all.
If you want to live in a cage that’s fine, but we suburbanites prefer to be free-range animals who are closer to nature and better able to care for ourselves.
Cover the roof and the landlord can sell the electricity to his tenants. Cantilever them and you can double your roof space and catch the sun coming and going.
My buses are generally occupied. Sure you have a point about whether or not people care about street closures, and that’s not 100% true, most suburbs have a few main arteries that would hurt to shut down. But your pollution arguments again are moot because there is less pollution PER CAPITA than there is in your town.
Yes, those are benefits, but the idea that you can’t do those things in the city is a bit overblown. Ever hear of community gardens and storage units? My building has a super who has a gigantic workshop in the basement with every tool imaginable. So it’s not like I do without maintenance or anything. The pumping your own water thing is not possible in most suburbs. Most suburbs have city water and city sewers. Are you sure you are not talking about the benefits of exurban life?
A cage :rolleyes: I live in a box the same way you do, it’s just a differently oriented box. Suburbanites are more disconnected from nature than city dwellers in general. Again are you not certain that you don’t live in an exurb?
You’re cherrypicking and inventing benefits to prove your point. How much lumber was used to make 100 hours vs a steel and concrete appartment building that houses 100 families? How much self sustaining gardening do suburbanites actually do? Close to none.
If demand drops in a city, appartments can be split up and remodeled. That’s why so many old Manhattan appartments are so small and odd. People generally don’t split single family homes into multifamily units. They just become abandoned.
But again, no one is arguing for the abolishment of the suburbs.
Cantilever would take even more sunshine and light away from the streets. This is already an issue in cites and addressed with development codes.
I live outside of ‘town’. Town has a free bus system paid for by sales tax that I pay every time I by anything in town.
To those of you that argue for a more urban lifestyle.
Who do you think supports that? You got a cow in your kitchen?
A better design is happening. All by itself. Local business centers and tech centers and people that can work from home. The city is dead. No point in it. None at all.
You may wish that, but people don’t want it. If they did, such projects would be more successful.
I’m sorry, but this is not an answer to my challenge, which was to your claim that “All the trends I see show suburbs being depopulated and people moving into the cities.” Tell me; is the population growth in the City of Boston the result of people moving from its suburbs into the city?
Well, to answer my own question, it isn’t. The City of Boston itself is in fact growing only very slowly - between 2000 and 2007 it added only ten thousand people, a growth rate of less than two percent (that’s significant growth??) while the metropolitan area grew by three percent.
Miami, FL? The metro area grew eight percent from 2000 to 2008. The city grew by 5 percent. Why would you think population’s shifting from suburbs to city?
The more spread out communities are, the more resources are needed for utilities,miles and miles of gas,water and sewage piping,all of which must be regulary serviced and repaired/renewed.
Miles and miles of telephone lines,power cable and optic cable with all of the provisions of the above plus the further electricity has to travel the more loss there is .(Also true for water,not sure about gas)
Emergency services have a much greater range to practically cover,needing more manpower,money and transport.
Also police and ambulance reaction times will be drastically increased resulting in more medical emergency deaths and a lower success rate in apprehending perpetrators.
Many people work in service industries where tele commuting is just not an option,you work where the customers go whether you work in a shop,resteraunt bar,cinema,theatre,museum,sports venue,whatever.
Tele schooling is not as good as children attending actual physical schools with other children to interact with and socialise with if you want a well rounded individual at the end of it.
Suburbs seem to be the worst of all worlds with all of the problems of urban life without the benefits of genuine rural life, none of the economys of scale of urban life or the real benefits of community.
Suburbs try to be all things to all men and usually end up pleasing no one.