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Other 196's:
I moved to a suburb in a country with unbearable heat yet because of how the suburbs are designed, I still walk more than when I did in the US. Everything from barbershops and grocery stores, to pharmacies and bakeries are within a 10 minute walk. Though I usually wait until night fall to do so.
I am interested in the replies
The front and back yards are there to increase pervious cover. That's it.
I work in municipal development and have worked in dense areas, suburbs, and now work in an enclave for the ultra-rich (average new house is about 7 million dollars in the city where I work). Every single developer wants to level all the trees and build as much on the lot as possible with zero pervious cover anywhere, and they don't give the smallest fuck about flooding the downhill neighbors.
I can see that this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the answer is... most people don't actually want to live in commie row houses with a bar downstairs.
I live in suburban Australia. We don't have HoA's and the police don't shoot people, but other than that I imagine that it's comparable to suburban US.
We have a front and a back yard because it's nice to have some room. My kids play in my back yard. We also have about 10m2 of raised planter boxes to grow vegetables. Lots of people also have a shed where you can store hobby equipment like bikes, trailers, camping gear, woodworking, et cetera. Some people have pool tables, sofas, beer fridge, et cetera.
There are some sensible rules about what you can do in your front or back yard but they're for everyone's benefit. For example you can't erect a BFO wall along your front yard, because if everyone does it then the neighbourhood would feel oppressive. There's also some varieties of trees you can't plant because it upsets the neighbours when it inevitably falls over on them in 100 years time.
You can't have shops in a residential street because most people don't actually want that. In most suburbs there are shops, bars, and restaurants a few minutes down the road. Far enough away that I'm not bothered by them but close enough that it's convenient.
In Australia you can choose whether you want to live in a busy city in an apartment with shops up your ass, or in the suburbs, or on a rural property with no towns within 100km. Most people live in the suburbs this guy is questioning, because it's a nice balance of cost, serenity, and convenience.
I lived in a commie block for 10 years and I'd shoot myself before I have to return in one.
People who claim it's the future have never enjoyed the displeasure of living in one. They can fuck right off.
You do know it's not only commie block or American suburb right? You can have denser, row housing, you could have better zoning. You hey privacy and and land, but you get isolation and most of your nation are mentally handicapped people from too much excess and misinformation in their life
Suburbs are not feasible, cost wise, from a municipal standpoint. They've been heavily subsidized by the denser parts of the municipality, and surprisingly by the rural parts too.
The cost of maintaining infrastructure in a fit state of repair (water main, sanitary sewer and treatment plants, roads, bridges, storm sewer, curbs, sidewalk, street lighting) for these semi-spread out houses is the same as maintaining it in denser areas without the benefits of the higher tax income.
Additionally, the spread out housing, at least here, has overtaken lower lying wetlands, filled in creeks, and increased water flow down the water courses that do remain, causing erosion, sedimentation, and killing off the aquatic wildlife. Ontario has just started to require Low-Impact Development, standards that require constructing artificial wetlands, soak away pits, raingardens, green roofs, or similar measures to reduce water flow off site and encourage aquifer refilling. These all cost extra money above and beyond what the cost of repair has been up to now.
I work as a consultant designing infrastructure repair and rehabilitation for municipalities, and have seen the cost of these projects. For most of them, it's the equivalent of their property tax for ~40yrs, and typically has a lifespan of 50-75yrs on the high end.
Suburbs are being subsidized through grants provided by our Federal or Provincial government, which is funded through other taxes.
It's not a "nice balance" it is literally the opposite of that.
Aparently most Australians disagree with you.
Yeah just as most Americans think their suburbs are the shit. Until they live in an actual walkable city and it turns out you don't need a car to survive.
I only just noticed this is posted in /c/fuckcars
Anyhoo. I guess it depends how you define a walkable city. There's plenty of places in Australia where you really don't need to own a car, and can walk to everything you need or use public transport.
Still, most Australians choose to live in the suburbs for all the reasons I mentioned.
A walkable city means you have everything you need to thrive within a 5 - 10 min walk. Not just "survive" - i.e a grocery store or whatever. Gyms, restaurants, local establishments, work, etc. Public transport gets you to the next region like that, and is necessary mostly to go somewhere because someone else you want to meet lives further away.
The more resources you waste publicly, the better. It indicates that you can afford it and brag about it.
Think about jewelry, expensive purses, sneakers, flashy cars, unused lawns, Halloween/Christmas/whatever decorations, etc.
As a non driving eastern European, living a few months in a Colorado suburb was literally one of the most depressing times of my life.
The answer to all questions is racism. We don't have public transportation because it became illegal to forbid African Americans access, we don't have public parks and services, because you can no longer have ''whites only'' signs up, we don't have stores in these areas because you can't stop immigrants from owning stores that whites see as 'beneath them' to work in, farming your own yard is trashy, because slaves were only allowed to farm food for themselves in small plots right next to the shacks they were allowed to sleep in, and why do we have remote single housing areas you can only access with cars that are over priced? To get away from the black people they could no longer red line to prevent living near them, and to create school districts non whites couldn't be zoned for as they were priced out of the districts, and then they adjusted school funding so it was based on land value effectively creating whites only schools with high funding. As the white racist mom in the 70s who was upset about bussing said ''if you let your kids grow up around theirs, eventually they'll all start to mix''
I grew in a town with lots of parks. Yes the smallest and shitest used to be black only. Basically just look for park in lower area. And we started building suburbs with redlines on day one the raciam didn't need to wait for redlines to go away. The school district thing. That's a bit more region based. Up North they mosrohad mono ethnic neighborhoods so they was less need to make seperate racial schools. The south although they had redlines and other housings policy creating black and white neighborhoods they also just went fully into making blackand white only schools.
Of course, racism is the source of every problem.
Let's forget the power that oil conglomerates and the automotive industry have on the government.
All these things are true and well documented. US housing policy is very much steeped in racism. Here's a video that sums it up pretty well:
Racism, like a bunch of other biogtry, is an important tool these oligarchs exploit to stay in power and gain support from ignorant and under-educated poor people.
Fossil capitalism filled the niche that resulted from racial segregation.
America spent so long cutting off its own nose to spite its face that it's no wonder it believes today that its shit doesn't stink.
For fucks sake why can't there be a place that's basically identical to america EXCEPT without the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fascism. What the fuck is humanity doing, god damn.
Idk Central Europe sounds pretty good
So many mixed feelings.
It's less of an option for me and my ilk because of language barrier. But Americans' inability to speak the various languages of Europe are a personal failing on the part of basically all Americans; our "education" system made us dependent, and our arrogance made us unwilling to accept both that we are stupid and that it is incumbent upon us to fix our own stupidity.
And now that I can't afford groceries, medical care, AND utility bills at the same time, I neither have the time to learn a new language nor the mental space to do so.
Maybe it's for the best that Americans can't just casually flee to Europe. Europe is already struggling to suppress a resurgence of fascism even WITHOUT a massive influx of braindead center-right neoliberal mouth-breathers from Jesusland.
Well the lack of second language is not just a usa. In other mostly English as a first language countries you have the lowest rates of bilingualism
Out where I live there are whole neighborhoods built and owned by rental companies. Rows of duplexes, blocks of single family residences built through the 70s and 80s. All rentals for decades, with some houses being sold off variously. And even then many of the buyers in the last 20 odd years were landlords themselves.
The guy I bought my house off of still owned 150 some houses in his direct name in my county, not counting what his business owned or his partners and associates owned directly in their network.
Tenants don't exactly have a whole lot of choices of what they can do on the property, and many can only stay a year or so. It isn't like they invest in the land: so grass.