I was thinking the same thing the other day. Like how much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. What percentage of the GDP is all that infrastructure (sewage, heating, power plants, power transmission, car production, road maintenance)?
Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.
> much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. [...] , but it doesn't create value.
The "value" is for the citizens that prefer suburbs style living.
People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.
But don't suburbs have the dependency on cars, and those ugly "stroads", and the "parking lot deserts", and "soulless cookie-cutter housing", etc, etc?!? Yes, all of that is true and detractors can keep piling on more derogatory labels but it still doesn't change the fact that many people really like the suburbs. A lot of USA college kids living in dorms in the middle of a "walkable city" have aspirations of buying a nice house out in the suburbs and hope they can land a high-paying job so they can afford that dream. Why do so many of these young people who have actual experience of living in the city want to get away from that and live in the suburbs?
> People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.
Of course. There are also people who enjoy walkable pedestrian and bike friendly places with lots of small local businesses to patronize.
That doesn't require living in a "big dirty city", it really just means making actual towns with dense downtown centers where people can work, live, shop, and dine.
Based on my experience with real estate prices, where townhomes near such thriving downtown developments can cost easily double of one in a suburban neighborhood a 15 minute drive away, the demand for that kind of living currently exceeds supply in many places.
The answer isn't to remove all suburbia and replace it with dense walkability, the answer is to stop preventing the dense walkable development with strict single-family-detached zoning laws, parking minimums, etc. and let the supply of such places increase to meet demand. Nobody will come take your suburban house away from you, they just want to have as much freedom in choosing what they want as you get to choose what you want.
And those that do prefer to live in big cities are just advocating for making those places better. The US has a lot of places that are definitely "city" but are still also car-dependent or at least not as friendly to walking, cycling, and mass transit as they should be. We can improve those without changing your suburban life one bit.
it's and/and. Suburbanites impose their values on the city (free parking, highways, vote against bikelanes, ...). I don't care if they'd be in their suburbs and just live there. go live in the burbs, be happy, but don't degrade my neighborhood with your cars.
we really can have our cake and eat it, nice cities for the people who prefer them, suburbs for the others, so much room.
Absolutely this. Every time someone suggests dense urban living or asking for people to pay for their car-dependent life, suburbanites come out of the woodwork and scream and holler that their rights are being taken away. As if the majority of the country isn't suburban sprawl catering to car dependent life. We only have a handful of dense, walkable cities with public transit in the entire country. Suburbanites have plenty of places to choose from, literally anywhere else outside of NYC, Chicago, SF, and Boston.
As a New Yorker, I'm totally fine with people choosing a suburban life. Do you, I don't care. But don't kill congestion pricing and think you're entitled to drive into the densest part of the United States and park for free in my neighborhood just because. Don't block funding for public transit for 40 years and then complain you need your car because the train is scary to you the two times a year you use it.
The political strategy in Ontario was to force amalgamate the cities with the suburbs so that the suburbs could politicaly dominate the cities.
Gross stuff.
You can see at the voting district maps the city of Ottawa for example will 100% vote for a different candidate that all the distant suburbs attached to their municipality and the suburb candidate wins.
My city (Seattle) is part of a large county that includes suburbs. My city is also part of a state with a mix of many types of areas. Legislation and budgets happen at all three levels, and because the city is a primary economic engine of the state, others have an interest in dictating what happens in the city.
Province of Ontario literally just passed a bill (212) to rip up already-installed bike lanes in City of Toronto at an estimated taxpayer cost of ~$50MCAD, despite opposition from city residents AND city officials, which is unheard of because municipal infrastructure is outside the scope of the province.
yeah luckily seattle (and other cities like tacoma etc) aren't like that.
seattle is always a poster child for this stuff but it really isn't that bad for the upper middle class (anyone with a software job).
it's probably tougher now. but i started my career in seattle proper 10y ago and 2020 was a giant boon. low interest rates, 3k sqft house outside seattle (but still easily drivable to it thanks to reverse commute) for sub-$600k (went under asking) and sub-3% (-> inflation proof)..what a way to spend that salary the 2010s gave me to save up and enjoy the remote career I'd long established.
preparation meets opportunity isn't gonna stop being true even in a "bad" economy.
There’s drain effect where as the city gets defunded, people with money and an interest in civic engagement move to the suburbs, and start voting accordingly.
Having kids is a pivotal moment. Suddenly that rich urban life looks like danger for your little ones.
I was an urban kid and we stayed in the city when we had kids, so my kids got to go to a school where the janitor had to arrive early and remove the needles and broken beer bottles from the playground.
Nope, it's not. But urban hellscapes happen somehow.
I grew up in my city when it was smaller, safer, and more economically varied. Now the middle has hollowed out and we're headed toward Manhattan, where hedge fund managers step over the homeless to get to their penthouse.
It pains me to think that this is inevitable. I don't begrudge anyone moving out of the city. I personally cannot stand the thought of getting in a car to do absolutely anything, but I know lots of people who live that way and are happy.
my city has consolidated with the burbs. so anything that benefits the core areas gets no traction because it doesn't immediately benefit the burbs. vice versa, other cities haven't consolidated, and they do have better city amenities.
they're not my fellow city dwellers. they've turned their back on city life, live 15-30miles away, rarely if ever visit. it's just an administrative, historical quirk that they have a claim on the city and local politics. other cities have different administrative boundaries, that hug the city proper much closer. Those cities have much better urban amenities (traffic calming, light rail, bikelanes, ...) than mine, because they don't have people who loathe city life have a voice in city matters.
Suburbs efficiently filter out poor people. To live in suburbs, you have to sustain a particular burn rate. You (or your parents) also have to have had enough money to get and keep paying the mortgage.
College kids hope to make it big, or at least big enough to afford a pampered expensive living among other such people. It's not an unreasonable hope to have. Some of course dream to live in a penthouse on top of a skyscraper, but that's much less realistic.
(Of course there are poor suburban areas with rundown houses and clunker cars, but it's not where the college kids aspire to go.)
Dense walkable cities are few in the US; they predate the advent of the car, and accepted a lot of immigrants when Ellis Island was still open for "the wretched refuse" [1]. After WWII, a lot of better-off families moved to suburbs, but the worse-off had to stay.
It does not help that some cities, in a misguided attempt to not trample on the rights of the destitute, or maybe out of incompetence, don't keep their streets clean, and even don't enforce the law. The authorities of San Francisco are, of course, way ahead of the pack; what they have done to their once-beautiful city tarnishes the reputation of cities as the form of living.
(Disclaimer: I live in NYC, take subway and/or buses every day, walk for my grocery shopping, don't own a car, etc, and love it. Politically not left-wing though.)
The people advocating to replace suburban homes in the Bay Area with multiplexes, low rises, etc., do seem to want to ‘come take your suburban house away’?
It’s been mentioned many times on HN in regards to Palo Alto, Atherton, Cupertino, etc… and often times not for altruistic motives either.
If zoning allows a multiplex to be built on your lot, and you decide to sell it because the market values redeveloping it more than you value staying, then I think that's your decision.
In the big picture, if you want single-family suburbs to continue to exist and be affordable it makes sense to allow at least some places to become dense. The more people who want density and can choose it, the less competition there will be for farther-out suburban houses.
If redevelopment is the assumed outcome of the zoning change, then that means the single-family suburb is existing in spite of market demands, held back only by such zoning laws preventing denser development.
I don't know the specific situation there, and I'm not saying that shouldn't ever exist, but it's worth considering why we are using zoning to preserve artificial anti-density in a place that has grown to demand higher housing density, and what the effects are of doing so on a widespread basis.
The immediate first order consequence would be higher housing prices, which seems to be the case across the US, with the cost of housing increasing much more rapidly than overall inflation or wages.
So I absolutely deplore the "what's your point?" attempt to try to pretend that somebody you disagree with didn't actually have a point. In fact, I downvote it when I see it - if the point was clear, and someone asks "what's your point?", I downvote.
I'm not doing that. I really can't tell. Who are these people who want to ‘come take your suburban house away’, and how do they attempt to do so?
You seem to be referring to specific people in the Bay Area. I'm not in the Bay Area, and I don't really know the politics there as it relates to real estate. So, who specifically wants this, and what are they doing?
I am not accusing you of false pretenses. I am asking for the specifics of what you are talking about. You won't answer (or at least, so far you haven't).
I will ask one more time: What, specifically, are you talking about?
Indeed, many people prefer living in the suburbs, but a big reason for this is the hidden subsidies the US provides for suburban development.
When housing units are close together (town-homes, multi-unit buildings) the cost of infrastructure (sewer, water, roads, sidewalks, etc.) are shared by more units, and thus by more taxpayers. If the houses are farther apart, the cost per unit goes up.
So its fine if you want to live in the suburbs, be we should have an honest accounting of the costs so suburban households are paying the full price of their spacious lifestyle.
Many suburbs are accounting for this in other ways already, by foisting ownership of that local infrastructure onto the HOA instead of handling them centrally through taxes or direct billing.
I'm grateful that I was able to afford a home for my family. I am the sole provider and it costs half my income per month to live in a townhouse in the suburbs an hour away from a major city. It's hard enough as is.
The trouble is that if suburbs weren't subsidized, there would be little reason to live there, seeing its residents move further out into more rural areas. The cities are willing to subsidize them as it is net beneficial to the city to have people who won't live in the city proper to still be nearby, improving economic activity in the "downtown" with access to more workers and consumers.
This comes up a lot but infrastructure is not the expensive part of government. It's schools, criminal justice, and other labor intensive services. All of which are more expensive per capita in cities than suburbs.
> People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.
That’s because American cities do their best to make themselves as car-dependent and unpleasant in downtown areas as possible. Of course American college kids want to move out to the suburbs, because American downtowns are not nice places to live. Offer people the choice to live in nice central walkable neighbourhoods like in Europe and they tend to take it.
How much of this preference is genuine, versus just taught or forced?
I live in Brussels and every time I welcome new American friends here and show them around, their mind is blown that it’s even possible to live in a city center at an affordable rate within walking distance to groceries, restaurants and activities.
Ditto Dublin. Incredibly walkable, with light rail and light tram services as well as a very mature (albeit expensive) taxi infrastructure and rentable bicycles for last-mile stuff.
Even in the very heart of the city centre you have full sized German discount supermarkets like Aldi/Lidl, or Asian/E.European foodmarekts. A far cry from the food deserts and bodega pricing endemic in American cities.
Even in the midst of a generational defining housing crisis, in what most people in Ireland would deem unfathomable HCOL, you can buy a 2 bed apartment around 70-80m2 in the CBD for less than €500,000.
This is in the middle of the Silicon Docks for example, @ 90m2 with dedicated parking space underground, and a concierge service open 7 days a week. 10 minutes walk to Meta/Google/AirBnB/LinkedIn HQ.
My kids like to play in our yard. I do woodwork as a hobby. My neighbors spend summer by their pool. I like my privacy. I like quiet and space. I like strong community.
I spent 15 years apartment living all over the world, and couldn’t be happier moving to the suburbs.
Suburbs and detached houses are available in Europe as well, often with good public transport access (although there are plenty where you need a bicycle to get to a train station).
It is just apartments are much cheaper and you can often not have a car if you live in an apartment.
Suburbs are cheap where? On what salary? Munich suburbs are equally unaffordable to buy something on a Munich wage, unless you're talking about buying in the boonies where you need to drive everywhere but that's no longer the suburbs but a whole different city/village, or you're a high roller at a FAANG, but that excludes 95% of working class people.
My ex originally is from there and I used to work there and my colleagues from the Texas office had more purchasing power at local real-estate than their counterparts from the Munich office.
It seems like it might be taught. I live in a Chicago neighborhood and have all of these things (a yard with a garden, space for woodworking, neighbors with pools, privacy, quiet space, strong community).
Not everyone who lives in a city is in a highrise downtown, most aren't. Not everyone that lives in a city is in an apartment. You wouldn't know that by reading this thread. The two options seem to be a large house in the suburbs or a highrise downtown.
All of these things have magnitudes. Have you ever built a cedar strip canoe, or are you making wooden spoons?
It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.
I made a pretty intentional decision about what I wanted, and actually have far more space than where I grew up. I was actually taught to live on less, but have gone in the far opposite direction.
I live in Chicago. I have 350sqft garage and a partially-finished conditioned 280sqft attic room that functions as a studio space. I have more "workshop" space than most of my friends in the suburbs who mostly just treat their garages as a storage space with a little workbench in the corner. My home is over a century old, although the garage is only 25 years old.
Now, can suburban homes offer you MORE space? Absolutely! And if I had the kind of hobbies that merited that additional space I'd probably want to live there. However, as someone who grew up in the suburbs, has friends in the suburbs, etc - the number of friends I have who actually use that space for enjoyment and not junk storage is literally just 1 guy who has a sweet CNC and metal working space in his garage and basement. Everyone else has a garage used for cars + storage and a basement rumpus room with maybe a tiny 8x8 workshop somewhere near the mechanicals (HVAC and Water heater)
The thing is in the United States there's an abundance of properties and communities available that give you lots of personal living and working space. In fact, it's pretty much the default. The frustration is that there's a shrinking pool of available higher-density living spaces that are all astronomically priced because of high demand and low supply, and any attempt to grow this pool of higher density space is met with stiff opposition.
==Have you ever built a cedar strip canoe, or are you making wooden spoons==
No, I haven't built a cedar strip canoe (nice flex), but I do have the room in my 2.5 car garage if I wanted to. Partly because we only need one car in the city for a 4-person family (which is also part of the "cost" calculation). I could also use my basement, if I was inclined.
==It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.==
This is impossible to say without knowing how much you pay and how much space you have.
It’s likely linked to my non-trivial ADHD that I need the space to work on whatever thing I go into a rabbit hole on any given year. Even in the suburbs I’ve had the fire department called; I probably would’ve been arrested had I been in a townhouse.
I moved from Brooklyn NYC to NJ suburbs and my 15 year mortgage on 4 bed 2 bath decent yard was about the same as a 1 bed 1 bath 3rd floor walk up that was pretty snug once you had two people and two cats.
I agree. I wouldn't move to city center no matter how affordable or cheap it was. Living in an apartment block severely limits the way I can spend my free time compared to an actual house with a yard.
> Or just come visit a bit and be another name on the list of Americans who had their mind blown.
I’m not American (but live here), and have lived in Europe and traveled most of it.
This HN hivemind if believing there is one type of person and one type of lifestyle is absolute lazy nonsense. I’m guessing you already know why I don’t need to drive a large pickup truck too?
I was talking about city centers. Good luck finding a house with a yard from city center of a major European city, for a price that you can afford without being a millionaire.
Just like in America, living in a proper house in Europe does usually mean moving further away from city center into suburbs. The main difference is that those suburbs do have better public transportation.
European cities have suburbs as well. In fact most people live in them, not in the city center. They are just VERY different from US ones.
Mostly 4-6 story tall buildings clustered around a major transportation hub like a metro or train station (which also hosts shops, restaurants and groceries), with row-homes or single-home detached houses farther away.
I live at the heart of Brussels, 2BR, 1250 eur a month. It’s not the cheapest of the city but it’s also not the most expensive; in fact the most expensive side of the city is one of its suburbs.
And living in the suburbs here doesn’t mean you have to use your car to buy milk, unlike the US. Stuff is still walking distance there.
Cost of life is average. Belgium is actually pretty great for that. It’s just the weather that’s shit.
Indeed. Look at the most expensive places to live in the Bay Area - it’s not the urban centers, it’s the suburbs.
Americans like space. They like big houses. They like not hearing their neighbors. They like to live on a street that is quiet.
Even the ones that don’t like driving are willing to do it as a trade off for all those things.
Most of the young people I knew in SF who lived there in their 20’s - about 90% moved to the suburbs when they got older. Being close to bars or restaurants doesn’t matter much for most older people. What matters is low crime, space and good schools. They can drive to the city if they need to.
> Look at the most expensive places to live in the Bay Area - it’s not the urban centers, it’s the suburbs.
Price per sq.m. in San Francisco for the top neighbourhoods is way higher than the suburbs, e.g., Nob Hill or Russian Hill or Pacific Heights. Getting a townhouse in those neighbourhoods is crazy expensive.
What proportion of DINKs versus Families live in the suburbs vs the cities?
The simple answer relates to raising kids - both in terms of safety/enrichment and in terms of basic things like school catchment areas, distance to young peoples amenities, and distance to the average friends house based on school catchment.
You're watching people respond to price pressures and calling it their unforced preferences. This is like saying "obviously people prefer to be childless", or, possibly soon, "apparently people prefer to eat only rice and beans". The outcome arises from a coordination failure that individual actors cannot resolve just by making best-responses within a market.
Family homes in the best suburbs are also very expensive, even after being subsidize by the broader tax base. There are lots of places to live in cities that aren't the "city center" just like there are types of family homes that aren't single-family-homes.
This line about suburbs being subsidized is a lie that keeps getting repeated. If I live in a suburb and commute downtown to work my income counts towards the city GDP and tax base but I would be receiving government services from the suburbs. This isn’t a subsidy it’s providing people the services they need where they live instead of where they work.
> my income counts towards the city GDP and tax base
You pay taxes were you work instead of were you live? That is very unusual, typically you pay income taxes where you live. I don't see how paying taxes were you work could even work, what pays for your school or roads if all the money goes to another area?
> If you are a New York State nonresident you must file Form IT-203, Nonresident and Part-Year Resident Income Tax Return, if you meet any of the following conditions:
> . You are a nonresident with New York source income and your New York adjusted gross income Federal amount column (Form IT-203, line 31) exceeds your New York standard deduction.
IANAL, this isn't tax advice, I'm going by what I'm reading and what I was told by people who lived and worked there, but looking at this if you have an income made from working a job in the state of NY and ended up with more than $21k of income you need to file for NY state income taxes.
There are a number of cities with income taxes. Detroit, Baltimore, Columbus, Cleveland, Louisville, Toledo, and many more. Of those I bothered looking in to, they apply if you work in that city regardless of wherever you live.
It isn't about where you live or work, it is about the cost of providing services. When homes are farther apart, the infrastructure is physically more spread out. This creates higher costs to build and (especially) maintain roads, electricity, water, sewage, etc.
I am going off of the study described here [0]. I'm happy to view anything you have to provide which proves it is a lie.
It isn't illogical. Americans move to suburbs because there aren't enough affordable cities. Then they complain about the cost of gas, energy, housing and taxes which are inherently worse with lower density.
Suburbs aren't for standard of living, but affordability. You take the most available labour, the most available construction, and connect it with the most available transportation and you get suburbs. All without the need for much effective planning, organization or innovation.
But eventually someone else does those things. And then suburbs are expensive in comparison.
I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.
I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.
I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.
I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.
That is the thing many young people don’t see until they have a kid and realize how much more difficult urban living is with kids unless you have a lot of money. Cities eat your time when you have kids.
That is still affordability. When cities are expensive you get more for you money in a suburb. A hobby room, home office or cooking space. But the cost of suburbs are inherently expensive. So when cities are affordable you get more for your money in a city. Because you get some space but also better access to things like offices, makerspaces or restaurants.
I don't want to rant to much, but most people don't like woodworking. They even less like doing woodworking on their own. It is something they conclude they should do because they can and don't have many alternatives. I'm sure it is covered somewhere online.
The first point is reasonable enough, but the point still stands you can't find the same size house in the city for the suburb price.
Most cities simply don't have more than a handful of spacious houses with big yards.
Your second point is invalid, as you're arguing against his assumptions. It's only possible to argue againt someone's logic, arguing someones assuptions is the same as calling names. I like woodwork and have alternatives.
You don't need the same space. That is the point. Yes, if I lived in a suburb I would also want more space because everything else would be harder to do.
I'm not arguing against their assumption. I said most, that isn't them. This is exactly why I didn't want to elaborate, so I won't.
A post explaining the reasoning behind a personal preference for living in the suburbs almost made you throw up?
Your close-mindedness of the opinions that others are allowed to have makes me almost want to throw up.
The person you are responding to isn’t displaying a lack of empathy for people that can’t afford to live in the suburbs. They are explaining the very real and understandable reasoning behind a behind their preference.
That’s not selfish and privileged. That’s a preference.
Look, I understand that the fringe groups you might associate yourself with throw around the word “privilege” as an insult at anyone that does something not inline with the group’s thinking, but it’s just not the insult that you think it is outside of those fringe groups.
Just wanted to mention that what the OP is asking for is completely achievable in a great urban city.
I live in an ideal mixed-use walkable neighborhood with a 2.5 car garage (that only holds one electric car). Not every house has that nor should it, but we can certainly build those features for those who want them and maintain walkability and good transit practices alongside mixed use.
The problem with the suburbs isn’t the existence of the single family home, the problem is the zoning and design of the homes.
> Man, this almost made me throw up because your post reaks of selfishness and privilege. Anyways, I hope you're at least aware of your extreme privilege.
This doesn’t convince anyone of anything and it doesn’t help us with building better transit and walkable neighborhoods. When you tell someone that what they want is “extreme privilege” and “selfish” you turn them away from the conversation. Instead we should focus on showing them how their lifestyle isn’t actually incompatible with good urban planning and good transit, because it’s not.
The future of American cities isn’t NYC, which I love and adore. We won’t have the density for that and skyscrapers and that level of density have their own problems too. Instead, we should look at mid-sized European cities and towns as a better model. We may have more single family homes and cars, but we can still build at the appropriate level of density and build different types of dwellings to meet people where they are in their life. Today it’s illegal to build an apartment building, coffee shop, restaurant, or small grocery store in the suburban neighborhood and we can’t build small, affordable units for folks either. This creates pricing imbalances and other issues.
A house with a big yard in the suburbs is the epitome of “standard of living” as far as I’m concerned. I’d take that over a walkable city block any day (personal choice, of course, I’ve lived in both).
Yeah, I live in a rural area and cities make my skin crawl. I'll take my quiet space with lots of room for my kids to play, explore, and to garden and grow food. Where I know everyone and we all have each others backs. Where the vegetation is natural, and there's plenty of bugs and birds, amphibians and mammals. Clean air and clean water. Surrounded by miles and miles of forests.
So many of the things people love about cities are the things I want to get away from, and would sacrifice a huge amount of income to do so.
The suburbs offer people a little taste of that magic and it's no suprise people want that.
You don't have to ban cities to get all that though, there are such areas all over Europe as well just that people prefer the density more until they have kids, and then they move further out to get a house with a yard and need a car.
I've lived in both and prefer the suburb. Inner city has all sorts of issues, from very little space, smokers puffing away as you try to enter/exit buildings, endless harmful noise & smells.
Actually I prefer rural over either of these..
>With regard to the United States, you’re not even close. 80% of the US population live in cities. [0]
For purposes of this discussion thread, we're just using "living in the cities" as shorthand for "high-density living with convenient mass-transit and walkable amenities". E.g. downtowns or multi-family housing near the city center where people can walk to the grocery store.
The majority of USA citizens do not live in that arrangement. Instead, most Americans live in areas that depend on cars.
The web page you're citing is using "cities" as shorthand for "downtowns + suburbs i.e. metroplexes" - vs - "rural farms".
Have you ever been to the US? Sure, 80% live in cities but the majority of that number are suburban cities. LA, DFW, Miami...all cities with large populations but all requiring a car.
> According to the Census Bureau, 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. The remaining 20% lives in areas classified as rural. *There isn’t a specific category for suburban areas*
Sounds like the suburbs are counted as urban wrt the census.
That statistic is defined as “urban” vs “rural”. By that definition, all American suburbs are counted as cities/urban areas. So the statistic doesn’t disprove their assertion.
Defense spending is necessary, if you want to keep your globalised markets and reasonable level of international security. Europe is now experiencing what happens if drop the "useless" defense spending too low.
I agree with you. I will go even further by saying that the EU being caught with it's pants down is by design.
Everybody rushed to join NATO and decided since the US was there as a backstop, they no longer needed to invest in their own defense.
It's a little bit like what happened in 2008 with the too big too fail banks and the bailout. If someone else is always there to pick up the slack, then what is the point of changing the status quo.
The EU countries were happy about this because they are broke. The US was happy to keep it's status as the global cop of the world making sure everybody stays in line. This line of thinking worked since the fall of the USSR but the rise of China, India and the global south is changing the world order as we speak.
> the EU being caught with it's pants down is by design
Being by design means they weren't really "caught" with their pants down (in the classical "caught exactly at the wrong time") as much as they chose to always wear just underwear expecting the US to punch anyone who laughs in the face. The EU chose to "purchase" protection from the US, paid via various means. Mainly providing credibility for whatever US needs done, and make the difference between "righteous" and "callous".
What they discover now is that either the US can be said was caught with the pants down unable to properly project power and provide that purchased security, or maybe the EU was caught with the pants down because they were unable to pay (less likely). Regardless, this is like realizing your service provider is no longer reliable, you'll look inside or elsewhere. At the very least you no longer look at that provider as trustworthy, and stop building anything relying on their services.
The cost of this will be spread all around but effectively it gave China, who has no issues thrusting ahead even without someone to clean up their image, an even bigger boost. It even gave Russia a boost, if you could have believed anything in the world can still do that. But a couple of decades of weak leadership on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to achieve just that... a US desperately scrambling to stumble China after realizing that the go-to for all their problems (the "war for freedom") is hard to pull off this time, and an EU that realized that outsourcing critical safety and security aspects is a bad idea long term.
My pessimistic 2c are that the next rounds of leaders will make it worse, on one side by not understanding that the "war for freedom" is hard to pull off this time, on the other side by thinking that outsourcing to someone else will definitely make it better.
Everybody except Eastern EU countries closest to Russia. It's not just NATO, but also knowledge that they won't be attacked first which has resulted in low defense spending in Western Europe.
the issue is that, at least for a long time, they where too naive believing Russia never would go as far as attacking NATO member or economical partners
was that dump, yes, but that was a _very_ wide spread believe
and while I have seen that mindset a lot I haven't really seen any one not worrying because there are other countries in between. I mean maybe such people do exist, further west then I live.
Like in general until recently, even after the annexation of the Crimea, there commonly was the consensus that the time of offensive wars between European countries (including eastern EU and Russia) is over because it makes so little sense (economically, power wise) that none one would be dump enough to do that. But no one calculated in a autocrat with Napoleonic complex, or should be say soviet union complex. And if told the pleasant truth, with facts, people did what they always do with unpleasant truths: Try to ignore them.
Sewage, heating, and power plants are included in GDP figures. Government spending is a GDP subheading. And such things certainly create value. I derive significant value every day from my warm, insulated, suburban bathroom.
Furthermore, your assertion that the defense industry doesn’t provide value is questionable. Until you can convince the various state governments of the world to unite in a global superstate, defense spending is a necessary deterrent to invasion and exploitation by other states, so it is, in fact, valuable.
And while I agree that suburbs aren’t the ideal form of urban organization, they aren’t actually the cause of all the social ills that you imagine them to be. Depression and addiction are driven by loneliness, and loneliness is almost as high in urban societies as suburban ones. Obesity may be slightly aggravated by car dependence, but it is still historically high and a major problem in the walking/public transport countries of Europe.
So no, the demon of suburban car dependence does not provide the explanation for all ills.
I haven't phrased it very well, I meant to say _american_ style suburbs are very... wasteful on resources, land and capital. European cities have suburbs as well, they are just usually 4-6 store tall buildings close to metro stations with row-houses and detached houses a bit farther out.
Detached houses are not the main means of living for most people in Europe, but if you want one you can still get one, it just costs more than an apartment (especially in colder countries).
> Obesity may be slightly aggravated by car dependence, but it is still historically high and a major problem in the walking/public transport countries of Europe.
I’d like to learn more about this. That hasn’t been my personal experience at all. Looking at the national level is challenging, as urban and suburban and income levels must be a strong factor.
> It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.
This is the safest period in human history by a huge margin. It may not feel that way given the ultra connected, headline consuming nature of most people these days. But it is true.
Global trade has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else, and that was first enabled by maritime trade which was implicitly secured by the US Navy post WW2. The Internet is the second coming of that, the invention of which was a result of US military spending.
You may think that US defense spending is too high, or take other faults with the US military industrial complex. But to say that it provides no value is uninformed.
> This is the safest period in human history by a huge margin.
There has been almost ten times more victims of conflict in 2023 as in 2005. [1]
And, as you said, we are now a bit more aware of those deaths (although I suspect a large amount occurred in conflicts that don't make western news headlines.)
The number of victims might pale against WWII, of course - but we're slowly arriving at time where WWII is not only "last century", but a "century ago".
I don't think anyone compared the figures of the Vietnam War of the 1960s to the US civil war of 1860s. Or did they ?
Anyway, in the average life span of an average human being with a normal memory, this is more likely to be one of the _worst_ period.
In this case we actually agree, but we draw completely different conclusions.
You're absolutely right that 18-20 years is a small period compared to human history, and that the average person has a lower risk of dying in a conflict than, say a century ago.
However, I argue that 20 years is _huge_ in terms of human _life_. Consider that the median age of the world population is 30 years old ! To most of the people, the way the world was 50 years ago or 100 years ago is as much "abstract" as what the world was 1000 years ago.
However, they remember the 2000s or 2010s. They were there ! And they saw more people fleeing wars or coming back in bodybags recently when they did in their youth. You might consider that only a "feeling" ; but I would think twice before dismissing it as irrelevant, because "it's only a feeling".
I argue that "local" inflexions in the long stream of history still matter. They can ripple in the long run.
It certainly provides value—mostly the internationally wealthy. Certainly not to the people footing the bill, who are largely restricted from accessing the windfalls of these profits.
hmm what could have happened in the last 3-4 years that would impact US life expectancy? also a huge part of that decline is preventable death due to drug overdose.
Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.