10 ms·

Why can't we build nice neighborhoods anymore?

121 points by cyunker 5y ago

lliamander 5y ago
I've seen some reasonably beautiful, middle class neighborhoods that were designed as recently as the early 1970's, but nothing since then. And while there are many aspects of modern interior design that I appreciate, floorplans tend to be universally terrible for anything designed since then as well. I have yet to walk into a (non-custom) home that was built since the year 2000 that I would ever want to live in.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  I live in a solid little house built in 1950. One thing I really notice about an older house like this is that the closet space is quite limited. Apparently people back then didn't have so many clothes compared to now. Overall, though, I do like the hardwood floors, the solidness and quality of build compared to what I see in more recent homes.
  - BiosElement 5y ago
    Older houses also assumed you had a wardrobe, so likely you were on the cusp of that change.
- com2kid 5y ago
  The floor plan thing is real. A 1960s-1970s split level will have 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a huge living room, a good size dining room, and a kitchen, all around 1800sqft. Or, you can buy a new 2500 sqft home that has the same, plus a walk in closet in the master. Heck I've seen plenty of 3000sqft 3 bedroom homes! It is insane. Sure these new floor plans have 2 dining rooms, a breakfast nook, a living room, and a family room, but that is also monumentally stupid. I've talked to new home builders and they have said that due to the demand of immigrant buyers for more bedrooms, they are now starting to make some 4+ bedroom houses at 3500sqft and above. Like... what? If you want a 5 bedroom house from the 70s you'll be out less than 2500 sqft, and that will be a very generous and spacious house. I just don't get it. Modern floor plans are asinine. Builders will reply "Well it is what buyers want", sure, but your pool of surveyed buyers is limited to people who can afford a 1.5 million dollar 4 bedroom house[1]! I do sort of get it, because land is such a huge portion of the overall house price, builders are basically stuck making high end "luxury" housing (never mind that the quality is very far from luxury) at high prices. If a plot of land costs $500k+, no way is anything resembling reasonable housing going to be built. Oh this also contributes to why people are having less kids. If an extra bedroom costs $200k or so, of course no one is going to have more than 1 baby. Disclaimer: Above rant is only applicable to large coastal cities. [1] I've talked to people in this pool, a majority of them are also wondering why the hell they are forced to purchase a house with 2 dining rooms.
  - tomatotomato37 5y ago
    I think there is more to that disclaimer then you think. With the ongoing trend of the young moving out from rural areas to more urban areas, it would make sense that some of those people still desire the type of housing you could get where land is cheap and material is cheaper.
  - Nition 5y ago
    Totally agree. Even if you can afford it, all the "bonus" rooms that aren't bedrooms are just more space to keep clean, keep warm and maintain. Unless you close those rooms off, but then what's the point?
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
    I just bought a 1600 sq ft home and it's honestly too small cause both me and my wife want our PC gamer setups so we have a dedicated room for that but then I need an office too so we end up hanging out all day in literally the smallest room in the house. I'll be doing a major remodel to address this among other issues. But yea if we had a game room or a loft or something similar it would be a lot better. The appraisal came in with the lot being 600k and the home itself is only 350k. Half an acre though.
    - com2kid 5y ago
      USB C or thunderbolt Hub. Get a desktop with a thunderbolt port. Run all monitors and input devices through a hub. Drop your work laptop into it and use that during work hours, swap 1 cable to desktop after 5. :D But yeah 1600 can be small based on layout. I've seen some 1800sqft houses that are super spacious though. It really depends on if the architect had it together.
  - knicholes 5y ago
    I think you're giving too much credit to most people and their ability to plan for kids.
  - lliamander 5y ago
    Yup, I have a 1-story, 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath, 1800sqft home in a solidly middle class neighborhood that was built around 1970. Bathrooms and closets are small relative to modern standards, but everything is well proportioned. We also have a decent yard that the kids actually use, and the exteriors aren't ugly.
jedberg 5y ago
> That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty. It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available. Or you can go to the store and buy custom built cabinets from a factory and have them in a few weeks. It's the same with the outside of the house. You can build a generic outside with supplies from Home Depot, or if you're really fancy the contractor's supply depot, or wait years for a master to do a custom job for you.
- saila 5y ago
  That's the current situation, but what about the past several decades? The article claims that very few attractive neighborhoods were built in the US post WWII.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    The cheap box aesthetic peaked in the sixties.
- lapsed_pacifist 5y ago
  Baumels' Cost Disease.
- yeetaccount 5y ago
  Same reason we don’t have stone masons in every town nowadays. Too much time, too much material, not enough customer volume. Can’t operate with today’s (lack of) disposable income and material availability being diluted by an increasing population. The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.
  - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
iammisc 5y ago
We've lost all sense of aesthetics as something that exists outside an individual's mind. Aesthetics used to be an independent study of philosophers for millenia, until our modern age decided that all aesthetics are equally good. This fundamentally has to do with the embrace of relativism at all levels of society. This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin I'd also recommend "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis (not explicitly christian, but Lewis was obviously extremely devout and a major apologist) It remains to be seen if the west will develop a sense of objective beauty without a shared moral system.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty. Just to play Devil's advocate, if that theory held up you'd expect there to be a correlation between how religious people in a given area are and how much they value architecture. Yet, for example, the Deep South in the USA is not known for it's architecture, whereas parts of continental Europe are (even today).
  - iammisc 5y ago
    No not really. Protestantism is so divorced from traditional Christianity as to be something else. Half the gospel preached is terrible new age nonsense bearing no resemblance to Christianity. If we look at more catholic countries in the Americas, the middle class neighborhoods do look nicer in my opinion. Edit: I should specify I don't believe this is specific to catholicism. Other religions also embrace beauty, like Islam and Hinduism. Protestantism by and large rejects the idea that material goods can embrace God, in their rejection of icons for examplr
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
throw8383833jj 5y ago
For some reason the vast majority of houses are ugly for the following reasons: the proportions are off. I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft. Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape. And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better. Another big problem is the 2 or 3 car garages which always have to be immediately infront of the house which makes it look like you'r coming home to a parking garage and not a home. Put the garage in the back, where it belongs and have a 6' wide small driveway with nicely paved bricks. Another even bigger problem is the propensity of people to put down pavement EVERYWHERE. the driveways are insanely big. the streets are waaay to wide. and then if that's not enough, they fill up the backyard with pavement too. If you take an arial shot, you'll notice almost half the lot is filled up with pavement: talk about ugly. And, there's no trees. Why? it doesn't cost much to put down some trees. it makes the neighborhood so much more beautiful and even decreases the temperatures in the summer. you could even make them fruit trees so people can get free food.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  > I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side A 3,000 sq ft lot is 54' on a side, if square. Your suggested 20' wide perimeter would leave a 14'×14' postage stamp, or 196 sq ft. That was about the size of my freshman dorm. > and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft. There's no second story — you've got no room for the stairwell!
  - rory 5y ago
    Stairwell? Just hang a climbing rope! Better home and personal aesthetic.
- dehrmann 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Architectural beauty is heavily dependent on context. Ornate gothic architecture, for example, peaked in popularity in the USA around 1870 and fell out of style in the early 1900s. Interest in it was revived in the late 20th century, so the same neighborhoods that would have been considered ugly and outdated 60 years ago are now "beautiful" again. A lot of it is also about uniqueness. The author is rightly awed by pre-war architecture in Europe when he travels, but tourists worldwide are similarly fascinated by glass skyscrapers in New York. Talking at the neighborhood level, houses constructed today are meant to be more transient vs those from the last century. Builders (whether a property developer or individual resident) will consider sale and resale value first and foremost before anything else. A "unique" house will have far less buyer interest.
- perpetualpatzer 5y ago
  Your transient point is very appealing to me. The line of thinking that people move more-> lower incentive to build custom-> cheaper finishes/less creativity feels logical and can be tidily appended to the Enrico Moretti argument that economic opportunity has concentrated in the cities-> more people detach from their hometowns to chase opportunity. There are two pieces of information that I struggle to integrate into this model and would be interested in how others reconcile: 1) US census data suggests (surprisingly!) that the % of residents moving each year has declined significantly since 1990, and before that was about the same back to the first data collected in the mid 40s (though with some collection gaps) [1] 2) Anecdata: most of the new builds I see around me (Boston MSA) are luxury apartment buildings or way out in the suburbs. The former aren't quaint, but are decidedly custom architecture. The latter, I stereotype as "folks settling down in the suburbs". Maybe McMansions, but I wouldn't expect transient. This one might just be a sampling error on my part. [1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...
- gremloni 5y ago
  On the surface what you’re saying sounds right but the only example I can think of is neo-brutalism though there aesthetics was never the point.
gwbas1c 5y ago
I disagree: Many of the most attractive neighborhoods to me were built recently. I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new. When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.) I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.
- zwieback 5y ago
  Yes survivor/selection bias was mentioned in the article. Agree about the Palo Alto observation, when I visit my in-laws down there I enjoy just walking around the old PA neighborhoods. It's like a free luxury house and garden tour. Total outlier nationally and probably globally, though, to be honest.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
The other thing that old neighborhoods have is mature trees and landscaping. Trees old enough such that the canopy covers the street. It takes about 75 years to get most of the common deciduous trees to that size.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bobulous 5y ago
> For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The presence of cars does not mean it was built for cars. The most important difference between pre-war and post-war neighborhoods is that one was built FOR cars
- Barrin92 5y ago
  also not to mention that Paris is one of the forerunners when it comes to actually getting rid of them again. In some European cities driving is more like trench warfare, trying to drive through parts of Rome at peak hours is quite an experience.
- spodek 5y ago
  How did the author miss the point of cars so much? > One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The problem with cars isn't how they look, it's how they lead to communities where people don't share space, can't walk from place to place, encapsulate once open spaces, and separate everyone. Plus they pollute and kill people. In cities built before cars, like Paris, people share space and interact. You can walk to the produce vendor, tailor, etc without parking in giant lots around box stores. Airplanes repeat the pattern on a national scale.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > where people don't share space … Airplanes repeat the pattern What do you mean? The person ahead of me on airplanes shares my lap space on the regular.
  - nightski 5y ago
    In the suburban neighborhoods built around cars I live by there are still many people walking around, kids playing and riding bikes, people growing gardens, lots of trees, and lots of friendly neighbors. Also if you choose to live in a smaller city (say < 500k?) the air quality can be quite fantastic. The quality of suburban life imo is a lot better than what people on HN tend to make it out to be. HN is rather hyperbolic.
Johnny555 5y ago
If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods, That doesn't sound like a good objective measure of what is a "nice" neighborhood -- I visit a lot of places as a tourist that I wouldn't want to live in. We have the neighborhoods we have because people are choosing to live in them. Some things, like a central car free housing core with cars relegated to the outside edges of the neighborhood sounds attractive on paper (and for some people in real life too), but when you picture yourself schlepping groceries 2 blocks to your house, or walking the baby out in the rain to the car to take her to the doctor, it's less attractive for living, at least to those accustomed to living in the American car culture. But really, it comes down to the bottom line -- people prefer to pay less than to pay more. If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, it's going to be a lot harder to sell those expensive homes. So the developer's not going to build them in the first place.
- mint2 5y ago
  > If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, Minor point, planned neighborhoods are at best a local maxima but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t sterile and bland. Irvine ca is a soulless sterile place with gobs of early 2000’s office park style landscaping all over the residential areas, and that’s even true for the just built areas. The new dev areas are all continued to be “master planned” and they are just sad. But hey, it’s family friendly!
ryanj20021 5y ago
We can and we are! I’m the CEO of Culdesac. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. That’s Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-resident neighborhood that is under construction now. Residents move in next year. Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. We have something exciting happening on site next month that is open to the public. Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Dm me on socials if you can’t find something. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs https://www.culdesac.com/jobs Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac https://www.twitter.com/culdesac Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219c https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219... Here's a longer piece on us https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/busi...
- andreareina 5y ago
  So FYI, this is really off-putting. You've got a few sentences that I might be interested in (but not really, there's nothing about how this is actually going to solve the problems except for "if you build it they will come"), and 4x that amount of CTA and social media spam. I'd much rather read a substantive comment about how your neighborhood is going to solve the challenges of being car-free, how it's going to interface with the rest of Tempe, etc. Directly on here, not just a link to your website and definitely not via a Medium or AMP link. A couple of links for further reading would be plenty.
- chroem- 5y ago
  > Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US What if I like my car, and the ability to easily travel outside the city limits that comes along with it?
  - 5y ago
Ensorceled 5y ago
I live in a wonderful neighbourhood that was developed in the early 1900s in an old factory converted to lofts. The workers lived around the area, the GM home was across the street. Similar factories, all lofts now, randomly dot the neighbourhood. Our "main" street is half a kilometre away and has shopping, bookstores, restaurants. All small businesses. Several transit routes run by the edges of the neighbourhood. Everybody walks. Everybody used to walk to work. Streets are almost all one way. It's cars. It's always cars that make neighbourhoods terrible.
- elynde 5y ago
  Wow sounds nice. Where is this?
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Toronto, we have multiple neighbourhoods like this.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Beauty or aesthetics haven't been quantified so they cannot be used as a metric to guide decisions in a world where all decisions are made via metrics. Looking at modern architecture or urban design, everything is designed based on a few metrics - cost, time to build & energy efficiency primarily. How does a policymaker argue to spend $X more on a prettier building? That would just come off sounding too subjective to justify today. Now we will no doubt see psychological studies telling us obvious truths about humanity - that living in nice places feels good actually. The paper will say things like "pretty buildings improve quality of life by 23% and productivity by 6%". But unlike subjective opinion, a scientific paper is a defensible piece of evidence so we need the study to justify building a pretty neighborhood in a modern context. This clinical economic view of the world is pervasive today so nothing can be justified outside of a utilitarian lens.
hosh 5y ago
Christopher Alexander had developed this idea of pattern languages and living architecture. Although the idea of pattern languages turned into cookie-cutter design elements selected by the developer and enforced by the HOA, they were originally meant to allow residents to have functional, aesthetic, and cohesive architecture. That is, in all the possible pattern languages, there are pattern languages that, no matter what combination is chosen, you have functional and cohesive architecture. Residents and communities then, can then choose something that work for their family and for their communities. Architecture comes alive, and lives and grows with the residents.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
The way we finance housing is a factor.
beowulfey 5y ago
Seems a lot of these comments are thinking “nice” refers to the livable sense, but the article is specifically referencing aesthetics. And then makes the argument that modern neighborhoods don’t look pleasing because there is no consistency between neighboring houses. I don’t buy this at all. There are many tracts of suburban (USA) houses where every house looks consistent and similar, with subtle differences in coloration being the main changes. And they do NOT look aesthetically pleasing. I have a different theory. Go look at an old building and note the intricate details on trim, along windowsills, above doors, under roofs. Look at old bridges, lampposts, street signs or skyscrapers. Humans used to build things with passion, and the builder’s pride shows in the result. Even low cost buildings like brownstones in the cities have these details; they give the buildings personality. My theory is modern construction, since it is often prefab or cookie cutter parts, lacks these human touches, and we subconsciously sense it when we think they don’t look “nice”.
- chromatin 5y ago
  I think your observation is spot on. When I travel in the older parts of cities, I like to point out to my children the details in brickwork that we just don’t see in newer structures.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  I remember the whole “identical suburban house with a white picket fence” being derided when I was growing up. So now this kind of sameness is encouraged? I think at the end of the day these folks just detest suburbs and can find a flaw about them no matter what aspect they look at. I really like your observation about craftsmanship. I think modern minimalism is a nice cop-out for cheapening out on details and mass producing the same things.
proc0 5y ago
There are two simple answers, one of which was mentioned already, in the comments and in the article: > I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through 1. Cars. They have ruined walkable neighborhoods, and in the US there are artificial walkable shopping centers, but you have to drive ther anyway. Everything being spaced out affects the architecture/landscape. 2. Building technology and ethos. It seems to me modern buildings are not built to last, and this is on purpose. Of course this is a huge factor! Old villages around the world always had many buildings that were made to last. This automatically means you will think deeply on its aesthetics, its symbolism, etc. Nowadays it's just about getting it done, and having an indoor space, with the outside looking as plain as possible for buidling costs and speed. I really wish building tech would also explore extremely durable constructions at smaller scales for towns and such. This would force people to think seriously about outside look and feel.
7373737373 5y ago
I found this video yesterday: "Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning" which was very illuminating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
frogpelt 5y ago
Nice website except for the popups and information bars every where.
dave333 5y ago
Village Homes in Davis Ca https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home Widely viewed as an improvement over plain tract suburbia but not copied anywhere that I'm aware of although cohousing does the same sort of thing on steroids. Reason might be that buyers have selfish insular motives initially and don't see the benefits of community.
kfprt 5y ago
Unfortunately this plague of bland boxes has come to my neighborhood. Internal volume is more valued than neighborhood aesthetics. It seems there's a correlation between these boxes and people never leaving the house but to work.
- Loughla 5y ago
  So my spouse and I built a 'bland box'. We did it for simplicity and practicality sake. Few breaks to the roof line = few opportunities for my roof to leak in 40 years. Simple design with a smaller footprint = more money available for high quality materials in the walls, floors, and ceilings. Tan siding because it's cheap and easy for me to fix on my own when it gets broken. Dark brown shingles because they will fade to light brown over their life and still look okay instead of needing to be replaced in the first 10 years of their 30 year life. Just saying, some people do these things for different reasons.
  - kfprt 5y ago
    I think this very much reinforces my point. 100% focus on the structure itself (especially interior) and relatively zero on the neighborhood or exterior. In a word, atomized.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      “How dare people build houses for themselves to live in and not for me to look at!?”
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        That's a clever twist of phrasing. You could just as easily have said "How dare people build houses for themselves instead of thinking about all the other people that have to look at them?" Clearly, there's some tension between these two goals, and the balance shifts back and forth over time.
        5y ago
fidesomnes 5y ago
And fails to mention building codes in an entire art critic puff piece.
thedigitalone 5y ago
https://archive.md/KGab2 https://archive.md/KGab2
zwieback 5y ago
Buried in the article is an important point: people care a lot about interior and not much about exterior appearance. Typical cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods are built assuming nobody walks around in them anyway. On the inside these houses are pretty deluxe, though. Also, in the US it's very difficult to build a house out of solid wood like my house from 40s. New materials might not look as nice but are less wasteful, more energie efficient and faster to build with. Finally, people do come to new neighborhoods, e.g. in Portland the newish neighborhoods like Pearl District are successful in the sense that they are new, high density and mixed shopping/dining/living. Not for low income though.
- bob1029 5y ago
  Quality of interior is so overlooked in these sorts of threads. Yes - from orbit it might look trashy. From the pov where people actually exist, it's got 13' ceilings, plantation shutters, induction cooktop, tesla power wall, gigabit symmetric connection to the goddammit internet, dedicated home office with bookshelves and brick facade, and a monstrous 5 ton air conditioner to keep it all comfy. Oh and the sprinkler system is on an automatic timer so you don't have to even think about how shitty a typical American lawn is. You pay guys to do that for you. Living in American suburbia is an unmitigated paradise if you can get over the principled outrage of how bland it all is in aggregate. The uniform nature of the developments is the reason why we can have nice things like fiber to homes. It makes economics of infrastructure way more acceptable and predictable.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Wouldn't it actually make things like fiber, road construction, and every other piece of infrastructure predictably non-economical because of how sprawling suburbs can't pay for themselves?
  - chmod775 5y ago
    > From the pov where people actually exist You think if the outside would actually offer something instead of depressing scenery: stores and cafes within walking distance, parks and playgrounds, would people prefer to exist outside a lot more? I could not exist at all in those suburbs. A cafe, various stores, and a supermarket within a 5 minute walking distance is as integral to my lifestyle as owning a fridge. Also having some forest around to go for walks is nice. The only thing walking for 10 minutes in an American suburb will get you is probably more suburb. If you're lucky a McDonalds and 20 acres of concrete parking lot will provide a change of scenery.
jason-phillips 5y ago
From "A City is not a Tree" by Christopher Alexander: > It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful. > Architects themselves admit more and more freely that they really like living in old buildings more than new ones. The non-art-loving public at large, instead of being grateful to architects for what they do, regards the onset of modern buildings and modern cities everywhere as an inevitable, rather sad piece of the larger fact that the world is going to the dogs.
- carapace 5y ago
  Christopher Alexander has a whole website dedicated to the idea of designing "Living Neighborhoods": https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/
diordiderot 5y ago
I imagine the lifestyle in many planned Soviet housing blocks was more pleasant than a low income American Edit: I just mean the physical environment, not political / social / economic
- rendall 5y ago
  Why would you imagine that?
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    No need for cars + greenery and public parks? Weren't there LeCorbusier style.
    - rendall 5y ago
      I dunno. East Berlin is pretty soul-crushing, with its block upon block upon block of blocky blocks. Warehouses for humans.
      - betaby 5y ago
        Less soul-crushing than most of the Montreal for me, which looks mostly like that outside of the fancy neighborhoods https://goo.gl/maps/vH7SwbRXdZndQszt5 https://goo.gl/maps/vH7SwbRXdZndQszt5
        rendall 5y ago
        You're right. East Berlin is not so bad: https://goo.gl/maps/KtpqjfJW2eUUcbP8A https://goo.gl/maps/KtpqjfJW2eUUcbP8A
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        Sad, I thought the whole idea was apartments with parks with 15 minute walk to doctor, school, etc and taking the bus to work
mkl95 5y ago
Right. I don't mind a house that looks old from the outside but is actually well architected and maintained. However old folks had very different lifestyles, which makes their houses awkward for modern use. In my country, the typical old house or flat has several tiny bedrooms stacked next to each other, offering little privacy. Oversized common areas are to be expected. Tiny bathrooms where baths were replaced with small showers, and claustrophobic kitchens that double down as dining rooms are common. However, my biggest pet peeve is orientation. Apparently, suburban architects didn't know how to use a compass until a few years ago. As a result, rooms often face south, which makes working from home in the summer nearly unbearable.
DubiousPusher 5y ago
Wow, what? IMO this article is way off the mark. Regulation is not preventing beautiful homes. There are three things probably most detracting from neighborhood beauty in America are: a lack of regulations, capitalism and materialism. All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline. Capitalism has probably had the biggest impact. The reason older neighborhoods are beautiful because they were built at a time when practicing a craft was hugely important to a profession. You built those houses with all the mil-work and trim because that's just how it was done. Yes, builders were seeking to turn a profit but in many professions, a kind of cultural ethic prevented raw profiteering. That changed after the war. Post-war programs and an economic boom meant that you could start a business around moving shear volumes of houses. These builders hired people who weren't trained to think a porch without corbels was a sin. It's not just they didn't have the know-how. It's that they didn't think it was important or essential the way an old-school builder might. Modern American neighborhoods are what you get when profit is maximized and community input is minimized. What people wanted in a house changed as well. The desire for material comforts like multiple bathrooms with indoor plumbing, loads of electrical equipment, forced air systems and more caused a good deal of the cost of the house to shift into equipment rather than aesthetic. The standards of home construction have gone way up too. From structural elements like the foundation to the quality of insulation to weather tightness. Edit: BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it. But if you want beauty, that requires a couple things: community review to increase coordination and enforced aesthetic quality. (These used to come from cultural sensibilities and now usually only are the product of regulation, HOA, CCNRs, ordinance, etc.) Both of these things requires the market to sell something people don't necessarily want to pay for.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline. I can’t tell you what’s more revolting to me—the idea of a bunch of neighborhood busybodies having that amount of power, or the fact the busybodies themselves are shameless enough to participate in this nonsense. You know what neighborhood I want to live in? A neighborhood as far away as possible from those types of busybodies. Maybe somewhere across a vast ocean on the other side of the world, where people have come up with handy expressions like “it’s a free country” and “mind your own business” that you can use if some obnoxious busybody shows up to complain that they don’t like the architecture of your house.
cwdegidio 5y ago
One thing that drives me insane about modern neighborhoods is the instance in tearing down every damn tree... so you are left with endless unshaded lawn. You would think with this modern movement towards reconnecting with nature, etc we would build neighborhoods that work with the surrounding environment instead of tearing it all down and flattening everything.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  I used to joke about the first neighbourhood I lived in after university that they developers named the streets after the type of trees the cut down ... 30 years later that neighbourhood finally has some semblance of tree cover.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Seattle has very stringent tree protection codes that have prevented the worst of such impacts. However the urbanist push for a high pace of concentrated development and population growth has led to many trees being cut down as exemptions were carved out for big apartment developers. With the additional population, it feels like the per capita tree count/green area has fallen behind. Now small neighborhood pocket parks feel like they’re always crowded rather than like a welcome escape, and driving through arterials feels less “organic” and more like driving through a concrete jungle. The thing is you can’t protect the environment and maintain a localized sense of balance if unchecked development is allowed. The aesthetic aspects of it, which I feel are important for mental health, simply don’t carry over. If you think about it, the promise of a high density core with everything within a 15 minute walk means that something else has to give and get pushed out.
brendoelfrendo 5y ago
This article seems all over the place and I don't agree with most of it. >For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The boulevards and avenues of Paris were built by the government as infrastructure improvements and became known for their use as long parks, effectively; yes, they were built to be scenic, and the fact that they're wide enough for car traffic is a nice side effect. Modern automotive architecture, though, goes further; you need parking lots or garages, and large signage visible from the road. Developers don't really care that a roadside commercial development looks pretty; people are going to drive to Target all the same. And, of course, let's not forget that Paris wants to limit automobile traffic as much as possible. > Diamond Head may also contain a partial answer to the larger mystery. Perhaps what modern neighborhoods are lacking is coordination... If we're using Diamond Head as our benchmark, it looks like what most modern neighborhoods are lacking is millionaires, not coordination. Your average suburban development is going to be quite tightly coordinated: built by a single builder out of a book of facades, floorplans, and materials. > These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.” Who is "most," here? I don't think most homeowners are building custom homes; heck, a quick source I found shows that only 13% of home buyers in 2020 bought new construction[0]. The only thing I agree with here is that homes are designed around the interior first. Look at any suburban sprawl house, and you'll see a hideous mishmash of materials, window shapes and sizes, and rooflines--especially when you go past the front of the house and start looking at the parts you can't see from the street. [0] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics
tortarga 5y ago
As the article hinted at the simple answer is Car Dependency. Suburbs are regulated and built to accommodate cars now and not people. The topic is explored thouroughly on the 'Not Just Bikes' youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes which uses information from urban planning group 'Strong Towns' https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.
- theamk 5y ago
  Nope, the article specifically addresses your point: > consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.
    - JadeNB 5y ago
      > Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present. I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones. Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design. This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing is changing, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.
adolph 5y ago
Nice neighborhoods are not built but grown, pruned and grown in cycles of fortune that seem good in retrospect but aren’t within human capability to foresee predictably.
a1pulley 5y ago
I live in a small, gated city in Los Angeles with 1 acre minimum lot sizes and rigorously enforced exterior styles, like white paint and single-story elevations. The average lot size is closer to 2 acres. You could snip the street map in one place and have a tree, meaning most streets end in cul-de-sacs. With a couple of exceptions, canyons have not been filled or bridged for roads; roads respect the preexisting contours of the land. The city isn't walkable at all—and it's on average 1 hour from my office in Santa Monica—but the open spaces between houses, the lack of terraforming abominations you see in other hilly developments in LA, and the white ranch motif make the neighborhood "nice" to me. Much of what I personally find "not nice" about modern neighborhoods is the clumsy imposition of our collective human needs—architectural, infrastructural—on the land itself.
cletus 5y ago
Two reasons: 1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero; and 2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars. When a lot of people say they want to live somewhere walkable what they really mean is they want their same 4000 square foot house on half to one acre of land next to somewhere walkable. Walkability is predicated on high land costs so obviously that doesn't scale.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  Pretty much this. I bought a house with half an acre to get away from the walkable city where I'd have constant harassment from homeless and drug addicts. Yea when I have a kid this house might be boring for them but to me... At the moment ... It's like a paradise of peace and tranquility. I can actually work on my woodworking hobby or blast my music and it's a non issue.
- randycupertino 5y ago
  > 2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars. We recently moved from city center to a blue-collar suburb and it is notable to me how much of a car aficionado culture there is here! A lot of my neighbors are into repairing and working on old (and new!) cars. They LOVE their cars and go to car meetups. It amuses me sometimes on here when people talk about how every car on the road is going to be self-driving soon and I think of my neighbors... they will ride around in a self-driving car when hell freezes over. One of my more redneck neighbors actually told me he enjoys brake-checking and cutting off the self-driving test vehicles he sees on the road. Which... I was kind of horrified but maybe that's good for the car's AI to learn. :-/
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
quadrangle 5y ago
Here's one attempt to address one aspect of this. The claim is that all the beautiful stuff we like has lots of detail, stuff that isn't so simple and plain and nothing to look at. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfort-and-visual-clutter-is-it-time-we-started-regulating-style https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...
scelerat 5y ago
I may be romanticizing it as a mere occasional visitor, but my impression of Tokyo is as a place which has managed to manage a balance of (incredible) density with livable neighborhoods. Lots of public transit, commercial districts, residential zones with small shops and groceries. Very walkable, bikeable, and even driveable if that's what you need. But within the city you seldom need to drive. I grew up in LA suburbs. We had to drive to do anything: shop, go to the movies, visit friends. When I finally moved out of the home I grew up in, I moved to Hollywood, the neighborhood, which is very walkable and has lots of good public transit. Later I moved to San Francisco, and at this juncture I'm in a neighborhood in Oakland built up mostly in the 1910s-1930s. Not nearly as walk friendly as my old SF and LA neighborhoods, but there are still good groceries, restaurants, and bars within a 5-15 minute walk. And it's an aesthetically beautiful mix of victorian, craftsman, and spanish-style architecture for the most part, in gently rolling hills surrounding a beautiful tidal estuary which reflects the downtown high-rises. When I visit my family in the suburbs, it feels really weird and isolating.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  The thing with Tokyo is that the cops do their jobs. A homeless person asking for money on a Tokyo subway is unheard of. I'd love something like Tokyo in the USA but it will never work because crime on American public transport is rampant. Hell just last week a women was raped on a Philly subway and no one did a thing. Adult hood in America is coming to terms with the fact that I'll never live to see this cleaned up version of the USA everyone is dreaming about so instead I'm scooping my single family home and getting the hell out of dodge.
  - ninjin 5y ago
    I am not an expert on the subject, but I do not think that the explanation for most of what you see in Japan is explained by “good policing”. There was an excellent article on policing in Japan a few years back that I sadly can not remember the outlet of, but I very much remember a sentence that resonated with my experience in Japan which was along the lines of: “It is not because of the quality of its policing, but rather despite its quality of policing that Japan’s low level of crime is notable”. Do not get me wrong here, I do think the many police boxes and the fact that you can greet and recognise the face of your local officers on your way home after work at night helps to form a sense of community. But my suspicion is that the truth lies more in the fact that Japan has a culture where people “police” themselves to an almost ridiculous degree in terms of all forms of behaviour. There are of course massive downsides to this kind of social pressure (especially on the level of individuals), but that would be a subject deserving an article in its own right.
throwawayboise 5y ago
Survivorship bias. All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.
hbarka 5y ago
One word: stroads https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

121 points by cyunker 5y ago

I've seen some reasonably beautiful, middle class neighborhoods that were designed as recently as the early 1970's, but nothing since then. And while there are many aspects of modern interior design that I appreciate, floorplans tend to be universally terrible for anything designed since then as well. I have yet to walk into a (non-custom) home that was built since the year 2000 that I would ever want to live in.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
I live in a solid little house built in 1950. One thing I really notice about an older house like this is that the closet space is quite limited. Apparently people back then didn't have so many clothes compared to now. Overall, though, I do like the hardwood floors, the solidness and quality of build compared to what I see in more recent homes.
- BiosElement 5y ago
  Older houses also assumed you had a wardrobe, so likely you were on the cusp of that change.
com2kid 5y ago
The floor plan thing is real. A 1960s-1970s split level will have 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a huge living room, a good size dining room, and a kitchen, all around 1800sqft. Or, you can buy a new 2500 sqft home that has the same, plus a walk in closet in the master. Heck I've seen plenty of 3000sqft 3 bedroom homes! It is insane. Sure these new floor plans have 2 dining rooms, a breakfast nook, a living room, and a family room, but that is also monumentally stupid. I've talked to new home builders and they have said that due to the demand of immigrant buyers for more bedrooms, they are now starting to make some 4+ bedroom houses at 3500sqft and above. Like... what? If you want a 5 bedroom house from the 70s you'll be out less than 2500 sqft, and that will be a very generous and spacious house. I just don't get it. Modern floor plans are asinine. Builders will reply "Well it is what buyers want", sure, but your pool of surveyed buyers is limited to people who can afford a 1.5 million dollar 4 bedroom house[1]! I do sort of get it, because land is such a huge portion of the overall house price, builders are basically stuck making high end "luxury" housing (never mind that the quality is very far from luxury) at high prices. If a plot of land costs $500k+, no way is anything resembling reasonable housing going to be built. Oh this also contributes to why people are having less kids. If an extra bedroom costs $200k or so, of course no one is going to have more than 1 baby. Disclaimer: Above rant is only applicable to large coastal cities. [1] I've talked to people in this pool, a majority of them are also wondering why the hell they are forced to purchase a house with 2 dining rooms.
- tomatotomato37 5y ago
  I think there is more to that disclaimer then you think. With the ongoing trend of the young moving out from rural areas to more urban areas, it would make sense that some of those people still desire the type of housing you could get where land is cheap and material is cheaper.
- Nition 5y ago
  Totally agree. Even if you can afford it, all the "bonus" rooms that aren't bedrooms are just more space to keep clean, keep warm and maintain. Unless you close those rooms off, but then what's the point?
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  I just bought a 1600 sq ft home and it's honestly too small cause both me and my wife want our PC gamer setups so we have a dedicated room for that but then I need an office too so we end up hanging out all day in literally the smallest room in the house. I'll be doing a major remodel to address this among other issues. But yea if we had a game room or a loft or something similar it would be a lot better. The appraisal came in with the lot being 600k and the home itself is only 350k. Half an acre though.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    USB C or thunderbolt Hub. Get a desktop with a thunderbolt port. Run all monitors and input devices through a hub. Drop your work laptop into it and use that during work hours, swap 1 cable to desktop after 5. :D But yeah 1600 can be small based on layout. I've seen some 1800sqft houses that are super spacious though. It really depends on if the architect had it together.
- knicholes 5y ago
  I think you're giving too much credit to most people and their ability to plan for kids.
- lliamander 5y ago
  Yup, I have a 1-story, 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath, 1800sqft home in a solidly middle class neighborhood that was built around 1970. Bathrooms and closets are small relative to modern standards, but everything is well proportioned. We also have a decent yard that the kids actually use, and the exteriors aren't ugly.

jedberg 5y ago

> That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty. It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available. Or you can go to the store and buy custom built cabinets from a factory and have them in a few weeks. It's the same with the outside of the house. You can build a generic outside with supplies from Home Depot, or if you're really fancy the contractor's supply depot, or wait years for a master to do a custom job for you.

saila 5y ago
That's the current situation, but what about the past several decades? The article claims that very few attractive neighborhoods were built in the US post WWII.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  The cheap box aesthetic peaked in the sixties.
lapsed_pacifist 5y ago
Baumels' Cost Disease.
yeetaccount 5y ago
Same reason we don’t have stone masons in every town nowadays. Too much time, too much material, not enough customer volume. Can’t operate with today’s (lack of) disposable income and material availability being diluted by an increasing population. The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago

iammisc 5y ago

We've lost all sense of aesthetics as something that exists outside an individual's mind. Aesthetics used to be an independent study of philosophers for millenia, until our modern age decided that all aesthetics are equally good. This fundamentally has to do with the embrace of relativism at all levels of society. This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin I'd also recommend "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis (not explicitly christian, but Lewis was obviously extremely devout and a major apologist) It remains to be seen if the west will develop a sense of objective beauty without a shared moral system.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty. Just to play Devil's advocate, if that theory held up you'd expect there to be a correlation between how religious people in a given area are and how much they value architecture. Yet, for example, the Deep South in the USA is not known for it's architecture, whereas parts of continental Europe are (even today).
- iammisc 5y ago
  No not really. Protestantism is so divorced from traditional Christianity as to be something else. Half the gospel preached is terrible new age nonsense bearing no resemblance to Christianity. If we look at more catholic countries in the Americas, the middle class neighborhoods do look nicer in my opinion. Edit: I should specify I don't believe this is specific to catholicism. Other religions also embrace beauty, like Islam and Hinduism. Protestantism by and large rejects the idea that material goods can embrace God, in their rejection of icons for examplr
  - AussieWog93 5y ago

throw8383833jj 5y ago

For some reason the vast majority of houses are ugly for the following reasons: the proportions are off. I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft. Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape. And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better. Another big problem is the 2 or 3 car garages which always have to be immediately infront of the house which makes it look like you'r coming home to a parking garage and not a home. Put the garage in the back, where it belongs and have a 6' wide small driveway with nicely paved bricks. Another even bigger problem is the propensity of people to put down pavement EVERYWHERE. the driveways are insanely big. the streets are waaay to wide. and then if that's not enough, they fill up the backyard with pavement too. If you take an arial shot, you'll notice almost half the lot is filled up with pavement: talk about ugly. And, there's no trees. Why? it doesn't cost much to put down some trees. it makes the neighborhood so much more beautiful and even decreases the temperatures in the summer. you could even make them fruit trees so people can get free food.

deathanatos 5y ago
> I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side A 3,000 sq ft lot is 54' on a side, if square. Your suggested 20' wide perimeter would leave a 14'×14' postage stamp, or 196 sq ft. That was about the size of my freshman dorm. > and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft. There's no second story — you've got no room for the stairwell!
- rory 5y ago
  Stairwell? Just hang a climbing rope! Better home and personal aesthetic.
dehrmann 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Architectural beauty is heavily dependent on context. Ornate gothic architecture, for example, peaked in popularity in the USA around 1870 and fell out of style in the early 1900s. Interest in it was revived in the late 20th century, so the same neighborhoods that would have been considered ugly and outdated 60 years ago are now "beautiful" again. A lot of it is also about uniqueness. The author is rightly awed by pre-war architecture in Europe when he travels, but tourists worldwide are similarly fascinated by glass skyscrapers in New York. Talking at the neighborhood level, houses constructed today are meant to be more transient vs those from the last century. Builders (whether a property developer or individual resident) will consider sale and resale value first and foremost before anything else. A "unique" house will have far less buyer interest.

perpetualpatzer 5y ago
Your transient point is very appealing to me. The line of thinking that people move more-> lower incentive to build custom-> cheaper finishes/less creativity feels logical and can be tidily appended to the Enrico Moretti argument that economic opportunity has concentrated in the cities-> more people detach from their hometowns to chase opportunity. There are two pieces of information that I struggle to integrate into this model and would be interested in how others reconcile: 1) US census data suggests (surprisingly!) that the % of residents moving each year has declined significantly since 1990, and before that was about the same back to the first data collected in the mid 40s (though with some collection gaps) [1] 2) Anecdata: most of the new builds I see around me (Boston MSA) are luxury apartment buildings or way out in the suburbs. The former aren't quaint, but are decidedly custom architecture. The latter, I stereotype as "folks settling down in the suburbs". Maybe McMansions, but I wouldn't expect transient. This one might just be a sampling error on my part. [1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...
gremloni 5y ago
On the surface what you’re saying sounds right but the only example I can think of is neo-brutalism though there aesthetics was never the point.

gwbas1c 5y ago

I disagree: Many of the most attractive neighborhoods to me were built recently. I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new. When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.) I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.

zwieback 5y ago
Yes survivor/selection bias was mentioned in the article. Agree about the Palo Alto observation, when I visit my in-laws down there I enjoy just walking around the old PA neighborhoods. It's like a free luxury house and garden tour. Total outlier nationally and probably globally, though, to be honest.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

The other thing that old neighborhoods have is mature trees and landscaping. Trees old enough such that the canopy covers the street. It takes about 75 years to get most of the common deciduous trees to that size.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bobulous 5y ago

> For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The presence of cars does not mean it was built for cars. The most important difference between pre-war and post-war neighborhoods is that one was built FOR cars

Barrin92 5y ago
also not to mention that Paris is one of the forerunners when it comes to actually getting rid of them again. In some European cities driving is more like trench warfare, trying to drive through parts of Rome at peak hours is quite an experience.
spodek 5y ago
How did the author miss the point of cars so much? > One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The problem with cars isn't how they look, it's how they lead to communities where people don't share space, can't walk from place to place, encapsulate once open spaces, and separate everyone. Plus they pollute and kill people. In cities built before cars, like Paris, people share space and interact. You can walk to the produce vendor, tailor, etc without parking in giant lots around box stores. Airplanes repeat the pattern on a national scale.
- adolph 5y ago
  > where people don't share space … Airplanes repeat the pattern What do you mean? The person ahead of me on airplanes shares my lap space on the regular.
- nightski 5y ago
  In the suburban neighborhoods built around cars I live by there are still many people walking around, kids playing and riding bikes, people growing gardens, lots of trees, and lots of friendly neighbors. Also if you choose to live in a smaller city (say < 500k?) the air quality can be quite fantastic. The quality of suburban life imo is a lot better than what people on HN tend to make it out to be. HN is rather hyperbolic.

Johnny555 5y ago

If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods, That doesn't sound like a good objective measure of what is a "nice" neighborhood -- I visit a lot of places as a tourist that I wouldn't want to live in. We have the neighborhoods we have because people are choosing to live in them. Some things, like a central car free housing core with cars relegated to the outside edges of the neighborhood sounds attractive on paper (and for some people in real life too), but when you picture yourself schlepping groceries 2 blocks to your house, or walking the baby out in the rain to the car to take her to the doctor, it's less attractive for living, at least to those accustomed to living in the American car culture. But really, it comes down to the bottom line -- people prefer to pay less than to pay more. If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, it's going to be a lot harder to sell those expensive homes. So the developer's not going to build them in the first place.

mint2 5y ago
> If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, Minor point, planned neighborhoods are at best a local maxima but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t sterile and bland. Irvine ca is a soulless sterile place with gobs of early 2000’s office park style landscaping all over the residential areas, and that’s even true for the just built areas. The new dev areas are all continued to be “master planned” and they are just sad. But hey, it’s family friendly!

ryanj20021 5y ago

We can and we are! I’m the CEO of Culdesac. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. That’s Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-resident neighborhood that is under construction now. Residents move in next year. Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. We have something exciting happening on site next month that is open to the public. Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Dm me on socials if you can’t find something. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs https://www.culdesac.com/jobs Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac https://www.twitter.com/culdesac Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219c https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219... Here's a longer piece on us https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/busi...

andreareina 5y ago
So FYI, this is really off-putting. You've got a few sentences that I might be interested in (but not really, there's nothing about how this is actually going to solve the problems except for "if you build it they will come"), and 4x that amount of CTA and social media spam. I'd much rather read a substantive comment about how your neighborhood is going to solve the challenges of being car-free, how it's going to interface with the rest of Tempe, etc. Directly on here, not just a link to your website and definitely not via a Medium or AMP link. A couple of links for further reading would be plenty.
chroem- 5y ago
> Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US What if I like my car, and the ability to easily travel outside the city limits that comes along with it?
- 5y ago

Ensorceled 5y ago

I live in a wonderful neighbourhood that was developed in the early 1900s in an old factory converted to lofts. The workers lived around the area, the GM home was across the street. Similar factories, all lofts now, randomly dot the neighbourhood. Our "main" street is half a kilometre away and has shopping, bookstores, restaurants. All small businesses. Several transit routes run by the edges of the neighbourhood. Everybody walks. Everybody used to walk to work. Streets are almost all one way. It's cars. It's always cars that make neighbourhoods terrible.

elynde 5y ago
Wow sounds nice. Where is this?
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Toronto, we have multiple neighbourhoods like this.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

Beauty or aesthetics haven't been quantified so they cannot be used as a metric to guide decisions in a world where all decisions are made via metrics. Looking at modern architecture or urban design, everything is designed based on a few metrics - cost, time to build & energy efficiency primarily. How does a policymaker argue to spend $X more on a prettier building? That would just come off sounding too subjective to justify today. Now we will no doubt see psychological studies telling us obvious truths about humanity - that living in nice places feels good actually. The paper will say things like "pretty buildings improve quality of life by 23% and productivity by 6%". But unlike subjective opinion, a scientific paper is a defensible piece of evidence so we need the study to justify building a pretty neighborhood in a modern context. This clinical economic view of the world is pervasive today so nothing can be justified outside of a utilitarian lens.

hosh 5y ago

Christopher Alexander had developed this idea of pattern languages and living architecture. Although the idea of pattern languages turned into cookie-cutter design elements selected by the developer and enforced by the HOA, they were originally meant to allow residents to have functional, aesthetic, and cohesive architecture. That is, in all the possible pattern languages, there are pattern languages that, no matter what combination is chosen, you have functional and cohesive architecture. Residents and communities then, can then choose something that work for their family and for their communities. Architecture comes alive, and lives and grows with the residents.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

The way we finance housing is a factor.

beowulfey 5y ago

Seems a lot of these comments are thinking “nice” refers to the livable sense, but the article is specifically referencing aesthetics. And then makes the argument that modern neighborhoods don’t look pleasing because there is no consistency between neighboring houses. I don’t buy this at all. There are many tracts of suburban (USA) houses where every house looks consistent and similar, with subtle differences in coloration being the main changes. And they do NOT look aesthetically pleasing. I have a different theory. Go look at an old building and note the intricate details on trim, along windowsills, above doors, under roofs. Look at old bridges, lampposts, street signs or skyscrapers. Humans used to build things with passion, and the builder’s pride shows in the result. Even low cost buildings like brownstones in the cities have these details; they give the buildings personality. My theory is modern construction, since it is often prefab or cookie cutter parts, lacks these human touches, and we subconsciously sense it when we think they don’t look “nice”.

chromatin 5y ago
I think your observation is spot on. When I travel in the older parts of cities, I like to point out to my children the details in brickwork that we just don’t see in newer structures.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
I remember the whole “identical suburban house with a white picket fence” being derided when I was growing up. So now this kind of sameness is encouraged? I think at the end of the day these folks just detest suburbs and can find a flaw about them no matter what aspect they look at. I really like your observation about craftsmanship. I think modern minimalism is a nice cop-out for cheapening out on details and mass producing the same things.

proc0 5y ago

There are two simple answers, one of which was mentioned already, in the comments and in the article: > I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through 1. Cars. They have ruined walkable neighborhoods, and in the US there are artificial walkable shopping centers, but you have to drive ther anyway. Everything being spaced out affects the architecture/landscape. 2. Building technology and ethos. It seems to me modern buildings are not built to last, and this is on purpose. Of course this is a huge factor! Old villages around the world always had many buildings that were made to last. This automatically means you will think deeply on its aesthetics, its symbolism, etc. Nowadays it's just about getting it done, and having an indoor space, with the outside looking as plain as possible for buidling costs and speed. I really wish building tech would also explore extremely durable constructions at smaller scales for towns and such. This would force people to think seriously about outside look and feel.

7373737373 5y ago

I found this video yesterday: "Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning" which was very illuminating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

frogpelt 5y ago

Nice website except for the popups and information bars every where.

dave333 5y ago

Village Homes in Davis Ca https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home Widely viewed as an improvement over plain tract suburbia but not copied anywhere that I'm aware of although cohousing does the same sort of thing on steroids. Reason might be that buyers have selfish insular motives initially and don't see the benefits of community.

kfprt 5y ago

Unfortunately this plague of bland boxes has come to my neighborhood. Internal volume is more valued than neighborhood aesthetics. It seems there's a correlation between these boxes and people never leaving the house but to work.

Loughla 5y ago
So my spouse and I built a 'bland box'. We did it for simplicity and practicality sake. Few breaks to the roof line = few opportunities for my roof to leak in 40 years. Simple design with a smaller footprint = more money available for high quality materials in the walls, floors, and ceilings. Tan siding because it's cheap and easy for me to fix on my own when it gets broken. Dark brown shingles because they will fade to light brown over their life and still look okay instead of needing to be replaced in the first 10 years of their 30 year life. Just saying, some people do these things for different reasons.
- kfprt 5y ago
  I think this very much reinforces my point. 100% focus on the structure itself (especially interior) and relatively zero on the neighborhood or exterior. In a word, atomized.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    “How dare people build houses for themselves to live in and not for me to look at!?”
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      That's a clever twist of phrasing. You could just as easily have said "How dare people build houses for themselves instead of thinking about all the other people that have to look at them?" Clearly, there's some tension between these two goals, and the balance shifts back and forth over time.
      - 5y ago

fidesomnes 5y ago

And fails to mention building codes in an entire art critic puff piece.

thedigitalone 5y ago

https://archive.md/KGab2 https://archive.md/KGab2

zwieback 5y ago

Buried in the article is an important point: people care a lot about interior and not much about exterior appearance. Typical cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods are built assuming nobody walks around in them anyway. On the inside these houses are pretty deluxe, though. Also, in the US it's very difficult to build a house out of solid wood like my house from 40s. New materials might not look as nice but are less wasteful, more energie efficient and faster to build with. Finally, people do come to new neighborhoods, e.g. in Portland the newish neighborhoods like Pearl District are successful in the sense that they are new, high density and mixed shopping/dining/living. Not for low income though.

bob1029 5y ago
Quality of interior is so overlooked in these sorts of threads. Yes - from orbit it might look trashy. From the pov where people actually exist, it's got 13' ceilings, plantation shutters, induction cooktop, tesla power wall, gigabit symmetric connection to the goddammit internet, dedicated home office with bookshelves and brick facade, and a monstrous 5 ton air conditioner to keep it all comfy. Oh and the sprinkler system is on an automatic timer so you don't have to even think about how shitty a typical American lawn is. You pay guys to do that for you. Living in American suburbia is an unmitigated paradise if you can get over the principled outrage of how bland it all is in aggregate. The uniform nature of the developments is the reason why we can have nice things like fiber to homes. It makes economics of infrastructure way more acceptable and predictable.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Wouldn't it actually make things like fiber, road construction, and every other piece of infrastructure predictably non-economical because of how sprawling suburbs can't pay for themselves?
- chmod775 5y ago
  > From the pov where people actually exist You think if the outside would actually offer something instead of depressing scenery: stores and cafes within walking distance, parks and playgrounds, would people prefer to exist outside a lot more? I could not exist at all in those suburbs. A cafe, various stores, and a supermarket within a 5 minute walking distance is as integral to my lifestyle as owning a fridge. Also having some forest around to go for walks is nice. The only thing walking for 10 minutes in an American suburb will get you is probably more suburb. If you're lucky a McDonalds and 20 acres of concrete parking lot will provide a change of scenery.

jason-phillips 5y ago

From "A City is not a Tree" by Christopher Alexander: > It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful. > Architects themselves admit more and more freely that they really like living in old buildings more than new ones. The non-art-loving public at large, instead of being grateful to architects for what they do, regards the onset of modern buildings and modern cities everywhere as an inevitable, rather sad piece of the larger fact that the world is going to the dogs.

carapace 5y ago
Christopher Alexander has a whole website dedicated to the idea of designing "Living Neighborhoods": https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/

diordiderot 5y ago

I imagine the lifestyle in many planned Soviet housing blocks was more pleasant than a low income American Edit: I just mean the physical environment, not political / social / economic

rendall 5y ago
Why would you imagine that?
- diordiderot 5y ago
  No need for cars + greenery and public parks? Weren't there LeCorbusier style.
  - rendall 5y ago
    I dunno. East Berlin is pretty soul-crushing, with its block upon block upon block of blocky blocks. Warehouses for humans.
    - betaby 5y ago
      Less soul-crushing than most of the Montreal for me, which looks mostly like that outside of the fancy neighborhoods https://goo.gl/maps/vH7SwbRXdZndQszt5 https://goo.gl/maps/vH7SwbRXdZndQszt5
      - rendall 5y ago
        You're right. East Berlin is not so bad: https://goo.gl/maps/KtpqjfJW2eUUcbP8A https://goo.gl/maps/KtpqjfJW2eUUcbP8A
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      Sad, I thought the whole idea was apartments with parks with 15 minute walk to doctor, school, etc and taking the bus to work

mkl95 5y ago

Right. I don't mind a house that looks old from the outside but is actually well architected and maintained. However old folks had very different lifestyles, which makes their houses awkward for modern use. In my country, the typical old house or flat has several tiny bedrooms stacked next to each other, offering little privacy. Oversized common areas are to be expected. Tiny bathrooms where baths were replaced with small showers, and claustrophobic kitchens that double down as dining rooms are common. However, my biggest pet peeve is orientation. Apparently, suburban architects didn't know how to use a compass until a few years ago. As a result, rooms often face south, which makes working from home in the summer nearly unbearable.

DubiousPusher 5y ago

Wow, what? IMO this article is way off the mark. Regulation is not preventing beautiful homes. There are three things probably most detracting from neighborhood beauty in America are: a lack of regulations, capitalism and materialism. All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline. Capitalism has probably had the biggest impact. The reason older neighborhoods are beautiful because they were built at a time when practicing a craft was hugely important to a profession. You built those houses with all the mil-work and trim because that's just how it was done. Yes, builders were seeking to turn a profit but in many professions, a kind of cultural ethic prevented raw profiteering. That changed after the war. Post-war programs and an economic boom meant that you could start a business around moving shear volumes of houses. These builders hired people who weren't trained to think a porch without corbels was a sin. It's not just they didn't have the know-how. It's that they didn't think it was important or essential the way an old-school builder might. Modern American neighborhoods are what you get when profit is maximized and community input is minimized. What people wanted in a house changed as well. The desire for material comforts like multiple bathrooms with indoor plumbing, loads of electrical equipment, forced air systems and more caused a good deal of the cost of the house to shift into equipment rather than aesthetic. The standards of home construction have gone way up too. From structural elements like the foundation to the quality of insulation to weather tightness. Edit: BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it. But if you want beauty, that requires a couple things: community review to increase coordination and enforced aesthetic quality. (These used to come from cultural sensibilities and now usually only are the product of regulation, HOA, CCNRs, ordinance, etc.) Both of these things requires the market to sell something people don't necessarily want to pay for.

philwelch 5y ago
> All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline. I can’t tell you what’s more revolting to me—the idea of a bunch of neighborhood busybodies having that amount of power, or the fact the busybodies themselves are shameless enough to participate in this nonsense. You know what neighborhood I want to live in? A neighborhood as far away as possible from those types of busybodies. Maybe somewhere across a vast ocean on the other side of the world, where people have come up with handy expressions like “it’s a free country” and “mind your own business” that you can use if some obnoxious busybody shows up to complain that they don’t like the architecture of your house.

cwdegidio 5y ago

One thing that drives me insane about modern neighborhoods is the instance in tearing down every damn tree... so you are left with endless unshaded lawn. You would think with this modern movement towards reconnecting with nature, etc we would build neighborhoods that work with the surrounding environment instead of tearing it all down and flattening everything.

Ensorceled 5y ago
I used to joke about the first neighbourhood I lived in after university that they developers named the streets after the type of trees the cut down ... 30 years later that neighbourhood finally has some semblance of tree cover.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Seattle has very stringent tree protection codes that have prevented the worst of such impacts. However the urbanist push for a high pace of concentrated development and population growth has led to many trees being cut down as exemptions were carved out for big apartment developers. With the additional population, it feels like the per capita tree count/green area has fallen behind. Now small neighborhood pocket parks feel like they’re always crowded rather than like a welcome escape, and driving through arterials feels less “organic” and more like driving through a concrete jungle. The thing is you can’t protect the environment and maintain a localized sense of balance if unchecked development is allowed. The aesthetic aspects of it, which I feel are important for mental health, simply don’t carry over. If you think about it, the promise of a high density core with everything within a 15 minute walk means that something else has to give and get pushed out.

brendoelfrendo 5y ago

This article seems all over the place and I don't agree with most of it. >For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars. The boulevards and avenues of Paris were built by the government as infrastructure improvements and became known for their use as long parks, effectively; yes, they were built to be scenic, and the fact that they're wide enough for car traffic is a nice side effect. Modern automotive architecture, though, goes further; you need parking lots or garages, and large signage visible from the road. Developers don't really care that a roadside commercial development looks pretty; people are going to drive to Target all the same. And, of course, let's not forget that Paris wants to limit automobile traffic as much as possible. > Diamond Head may also contain a partial answer to the larger mystery. Perhaps what modern neighborhoods are lacking is coordination... If we're using Diamond Head as our benchmark, it looks like what most modern neighborhoods are lacking is millionaires, not coordination. Your average suburban development is going to be quite tightly coordinated: built by a single builder out of a book of facades, floorplans, and materials. > These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.” Who is "most," here? I don't think most homeowners are building custom homes; heck, a quick source I found shows that only 13% of home buyers in 2020 bought new construction[0]. The only thing I agree with here is that homes are designed around the interior first. Look at any suburban sprawl house, and you'll see a hideous mishmash of materials, window shapes and sizes, and rooflines--especially when you go past the front of the house and start looking at the parts you can't see from the street. [0] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics

tortarga 5y ago

As the article hinted at the simple answer is Car Dependency. Suburbs are regulated and built to accommodate cars now and not people. The topic is explored thouroughly on the 'Not Just Bikes' youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes which uses information from urban planning group 'Strong Towns' https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.

theamk 5y ago
Nope, the article specifically addresses your point: > consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    > Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present. I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones. Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design. This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing is changing, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.

adolph 5y ago

Nice neighborhoods are not built but grown, pruned and grown in cycles of fortune that seem good in retrospect but aren’t within human capability to foresee predictably.

a1pulley 5y ago

I live in a small, gated city in Los Angeles with 1 acre minimum lot sizes and rigorously enforced exterior styles, like white paint and single-story elevations. The average lot size is closer to 2 acres. You could snip the street map in one place and have a tree, meaning most streets end in cul-de-sacs. With a couple of exceptions, canyons have not been filled or bridged for roads; roads respect the preexisting contours of the land. The city isn't walkable at all—and it's on average 1 hour from my office in Santa Monica—but the open spaces between houses, the lack of terraforming abominations you see in other hilly developments in LA, and the white ranch motif make the neighborhood "nice" to me. Much of what I personally find "not nice" about modern neighborhoods is the clumsy imposition of our collective human needs—architectural, infrastructural—on the land itself.

cletus 5y ago

Two reasons: 1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero; and 2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars. When a lot of people say they want to live somewhere walkable what they really mean is they want their same 4000 square foot house on half to one acre of land next to somewhere walkable. Walkability is predicated on high land costs so obviously that doesn't scale.

0x0nyandesu 5y ago
Pretty much this. I bought a house with half an acre to get away from the walkable city where I'd have constant harassment from homeless and drug addicts. Yea when I have a kid this house might be boring for them but to me... At the moment ... It's like a paradise of peace and tranquility. I can actually work on my woodworking hobby or blast my music and it's a non issue.
randycupertino 5y ago
> 2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars. We recently moved from city center to a blue-collar suburb and it is notable to me how much of a car aficionado culture there is here! A lot of my neighbors are into repairing and working on old (and new!) cars. They LOVE their cars and go to car meetups. It amuses me sometimes on here when people talk about how every car on the road is going to be self-driving soon and I think of my neighbors... they will ride around in a self-driving car when hell freezes over. One of my more redneck neighbors actually told me he enjoys brake-checking and cutting off the self-driving test vehicles he sees on the road. Which... I was kind of horrified but maybe that's good for the car's AI to learn. :-/
- inglor_cz 5y ago

quadrangle 5y ago

Here's one attempt to address one aspect of this. The claim is that all the beautiful stuff we like has lots of detail, stuff that isn't so simple and plain and nothing to look at. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfort-and-visual-clutter-is-it-time-we-started-regulating-style https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...

scelerat 5y ago

I may be romanticizing it as a mere occasional visitor, but my impression of Tokyo is as a place which has managed to manage a balance of (incredible) density with livable neighborhoods. Lots of public transit, commercial districts, residential zones with small shops and groceries. Very walkable, bikeable, and even driveable if that's what you need. But within the city you seldom need to drive. I grew up in LA suburbs. We had to drive to do anything: shop, go to the movies, visit friends. When I finally moved out of the home I grew up in, I moved to Hollywood, the neighborhood, which is very walkable and has lots of good public transit. Later I moved to San Francisco, and at this juncture I'm in a neighborhood in Oakland built up mostly in the 1910s-1930s. Not nearly as walk friendly as my old SF and LA neighborhoods, but there are still good groceries, restaurants, and bars within a 5-15 minute walk. And it's an aesthetically beautiful mix of victorian, craftsman, and spanish-style architecture for the most part, in gently rolling hills surrounding a beautiful tidal estuary which reflects the downtown high-rises. When I visit my family in the suburbs, it feels really weird and isolating.

0x0nyandesu 5y ago
The thing with Tokyo is that the cops do their jobs. A homeless person asking for money on a Tokyo subway is unheard of. I'd love something like Tokyo in the USA but it will never work because crime on American public transport is rampant. Hell just last week a women was raped on a Philly subway and no one did a thing. Adult hood in America is coming to terms with the fact that I'll never live to see this cleaned up version of the USA everyone is dreaming about so instead I'm scooping my single family home and getting the hell out of dodge.
- ninjin 5y ago
  I am not an expert on the subject, but I do not think that the explanation for most of what you see in Japan is explained by “good policing”. There was an excellent article on policing in Japan a few years back that I sadly can not remember the outlet of, but I very much remember a sentence that resonated with my experience in Japan which was along the lines of: “It is not because of the quality of its policing, but rather despite its quality of policing that Japan’s low level of crime is notable”. Do not get me wrong here, I do think the many police boxes and the fact that you can greet and recognise the face of your local officers on your way home after work at night helps to form a sense of community. But my suspicion is that the truth lies more in the fact that Japan has a culture where people “police” themselves to an almost ridiculous degree in terms of all forms of behaviour. There are of course massive downsides to this kind of social pressure (especially on the level of individuals), but that would be a subject deserving an article in its own right.

throwawayboise 5y ago

Survivorship bias. All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.

hbarka 5y ago

One word: stroads https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM