West Coast baby
Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can’t really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I’m not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don’t understand how you’re gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn’t live there, it’s too impersonal.
The community would be those who you see at the same café or whatever. Ideally places would have some kind of board or system for people to organize activities. These could be political or just something fun, like a board game night or other things.
As for the kid thing, in many cities the kids will commute to school or other places on their own. We’ve created a system where that’s unsafe in almost all locations in the US, but it isn’t required. We have a society of helicopter parents, partially out of necessity because kids can’t get anywhere on their own.
I understand what’s trying to be said here but I’d pass on that.
I’ve lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can’t hear what my neighbors are saying, don’t need to pay for laundry, don’t need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don’t have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I’m not going back to an apartment.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it’s not required.
Based on what this meme is proposing, I can smell the urine in the elevators from here.
I think the kids are deluded and have no idea what they’re missing. Density is hell. Single family homes are expensive because the vast majority of people don’t want to spend the rest of their lives living in apartments.
Exactly. My main reasons why I want a home instead of an apartment is the lack of space, the need to have some private space outside (i.e. a courtyard) and privacy. A lower density apartment building that has all these things could be built, but it would probably be a luxury apartment that would cost an obscene amount of money.
I can’t hear my neighbors, don’t need an elevator, and don’t need a garage because I don’t need a car. I don’t have a back yard but I’m pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
Other than SF. Where do you live in CA that doesn’t require you to need a car?
I know you can make due. I lived without one for a long time, but it was a the biggest pain the ass not having one. Unless I only wanted to stay in my little local bubble.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it’s just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother’s apartment I can hear his neighbor’s coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit’s got tissues for walls I swear.
Good for you since you can afford it. Most people cannot. Which means you would still have your house in the suburbs somewhere, but all of these problems would be solved.
You are still paying for laundry. As a homeowner the full cost of replacing and maintaining the machines is on you. You also have to pay for the electricty and the water usage.
So what? This is standard and it’s perfectly acceptable for the average homeowner. It sucks a million times worse to have to go to a laundromat, I’ve been there and done that.
Having to share on-site laundry facilities with other residents is bad enough (especially with the BRAND NEW machines breaking down all the time). If I had to go hang out at a laundromat every couple weeks for hours, I’d be even more depressed…
Question from a European: Why does living in an apartment mean you have to go to a laundromat? Do apartments in the US not have washing machines?
YEP. Same here. It’s a world of difference, having room to do whatever you want in peace and privacy.
When I lived in apartments back in the 2000s I couldn’t even leave anything of value on my porch or doorstep without fear of it being stolen. My girlfriend’s bike was stolen from the 2nd floor where it was parked right in front of our apartment door. At my apartment before that a drunk stole a wooden pallet that I had on the porch. They stole fucking wood!
But out here at my rural home, I have land and a garden and we can leave our cars unlocked and bikes or whatever outdoors and nobody messes with it.
So y’all can keep all that urban density and I will stay far away from it most of the time.
I think you’re making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can’t have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.
Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you’ve made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there’s less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don’t need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.
The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You’ve got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won’t put them a plane ride away from home. And you’ve got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.
Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I’m saying? You don’t have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.
Could easily fix “LISA” in the last panel to “USA”, and remove California from the first panel, and boom, you got a meme for the whole country
Yeah it won’t really solve it in a single city though. NYC has tons and tons of dense urban housing but still insane housing prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
Population density in NYC ranges from 8.6k people/sqmi to 74k people/sqmi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
San Fransisco manages 1.1k people/sqmi on average with a San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area density of 953 person/sqmi density.
The insane traffic in New York is easily avoidable if you’re traveling to points on the subway line. If you’re trying to take the Bay Shore ferry to Ocean Beach, you’re going to have a bit of trouble getting from the LIRR to the port, because they never bothered to build a connecting route. But that’s more a feature than a bug - Fire Island is made deliberately inaccessible as an enclave to the New York elites. Getting into and out of JFK and La Guardia airports is, similarly, nightmarish by design (or lack there of). Modern NYC city planners hate you for using any kind of public transit. But I can walk out my front door on 17th street Manhattan at 8am, amble over to the Amtrak, and be in DC by lunch. No other part of the country is like that.
Similarly, if you make it out to the Bronx or the north side of Manhattan (where they’re having all the nasty flooding because nobody invested in proper build up / drainage up there) you can find some pretty cheap housing. Used to be you could find cheap housing all over Brooklyn and Staten Island too, but… it all got developed into “luxury” spaces with more sqft units for a smaller, wealthier group of people.
But to say SF has the same problems as NYC is wildly inaccurate. NYC simply could not exist under the conditions LA and SF have been developed. We’re not just talking “bad traffic” but “not enough physical real estate to store that many cars”. We’re not just talking about homelessness but “physically not enough space for this many people”.
NYC would look more like Connecticut or Rhode Island under the SF development model. Even suburban New Jersey manages higher density rates. At that scale, you’re not “solving” homelessness. You’re just defining it away by denying people the physical space to exist inside the city limits.
The meme presents dense development as a panacea, and it absolutely isn’t. At the end of the day, more units at the same price point won’t solve homelessness and more rail absent sufficient stations/operating hours can’t serve the same public (as NYers are struggling to come to terms with). But the number of people who can and do live reasonably comfortably in NYC at a lower price point vastly outstrips the peers in California. And, as a consequence, the kind of problems NYC suffers from boil down to maintaining a heavily utilized urban environment rather than building one over the suburban sprawl that chokes off development at every turn.
Two totally different problems.
Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?
The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.
The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.
Anybody claiming one general solution will fix every single grievance they have sounds a step away from buying essential oils.
Don’t get me wrong, it will help, but no every pet problem will not be magically solved by waving hands and going “just do better urban panning, duh”
Just don’t romanticize your proposed solution to a degree where you think you can slap it in and problems solve themselves.
I mean the overarching problem being talked about here is not having well planned cities (ie 15 min cities) that provide housing for everyone.
The solution mentioned would absolutely solve or go a long way to solve all the problems mentioned in the meme.
I don’t disagree that it would improve things. But don’t just expect something to fix all the problems magically, especially not when it’s basically waving your hands and going “just city plan better this time around.” It won’t be magical, 40 years down the line when this movement of new planning strategies is finally finished, it will already have been outdated for 35 years. These problems are hilariously complicated.
Outdated? The things that people are now advocating for are things that used to be commonplace:
- being close to shops, work, and third places
- large areas of inner cities left for public parks
- roads not yet dominated by cars
- majority of people relying on decent affordable/free public transport or walking
Yeah, this is not a “slap it in” solution. If indeed it does solve all of these problems. Traffic is gonna get worse before it gets better if you take away roads and lanes. Culture has to shift and people have to leave their cars at home, or really affordable housing and good transit? Thats just gonna supply the outsized demand to move to California’s densest areas. So you’ll have the same problem, but with lots of new people who don’t experience it. Planning has to find people who will change their lives to make all of society better, too.
Traffic was pretty damn good during covid when everyone was working from home. We could go back to that for starters.
