this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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How about nice green suburbs with single family homes and a lot fewer people?
No, im good on suburbia, it’s inherently damaging to both our mental health and the natural ecosystems of the planet. You cannot have a sustainable single family suburb.
Ok, well surely you recognize that there are lots of people who agree with me - who feel single family homes are nice and living elbow to elbow with your neighbors in maximum density is not in any way desirable.
Unfortunately, ultra-urbanist zealots are very loud online. I suspect many of them will change their tunes with age.
Edit: what's damaging to the ecosystems of our planet is PEOPLE! There's no law of nature that states a suburban density isn't sustainable, just that it's unsustainable for 8b people. You're proposing eco-austerity because human population is out of control
cool where's everyone else gonna live then
Let the population contract to <<1b as it was for thousands of years of civilization before industrial agriculture caused a very recent explosion in population the past 2 centuries (predominantly the 20th century)
That's...not a thing
Like literally absurd to even consider as a physical possibility.
How exactly is the population supposed to contract?
Under 1 billion is unrealistic but some contraction will happen. The main factor dictating how many children people will have is infant mortality of the previous one or two generations as well as the existence of pension systems.
...which is the reason why developed countries have birth rates below replacement level and with increased wealth elsewhere it's also going to happen there, which would mean contraction everywhere. I don't expect that to keep up forever, however, states will get their shit together and set incentive structures (in particular making having kids affordable) long before we're contracting to one billion.
Developing countries are not anywhere close to that happening. Their populations are still booming.
Yes. The likely turning point, according to the UN, is around 11bn in 2100, then declining. Plus or minus a billion or two and a couple of decades.
Which is btw nowhere close to the earth' carrying capacity though that's highly variable in the first place. It's probably not a good idea to pine for a population increase past that point and leave some room for other species. And no matter how many we are it's a good idea to minimise ecological impact. Why do people want fresh strawberries in winter anyway those transportation-stable strains taste like water. If you want strawberries in winter eat jam.
Also note that this overshoot is happening precisely because developing countries are, well, developing: Their fertility rates still stick to the old child mortality rates but the actual rates are lower so you get a population spike. Keep that up a generation or two and they plateau, then fall as people don't require kids to provide for them in old age and also are barely affording rent with dual income from three jobs each so they definitely can't afford a kid. Oh wait that was the US in particular. But yes that's exactly what you want to avoid to halt contraction.
That's great and all but it doesn't help us with the much more immediate housing and climate crises.
Education? Contraception? It's not fucking rocket science. Every developed country in the world is at well below replacement rates. The idea needs to be promoted and not derided or conflated with eugenics (which it emphatically isn't). Blunting the impact of an aging population is the most difficult problem.
Edit: the most difficult problem is that capitalism demands perpetual growth, and billionaires and heads of state with a vested interest in growth would never allow the population to shrink without extreme resistance, like pervasive propaganda and outlawing abortion.
Even if you're correct, that will take HUNDREDS of years
Sure, and so will slowing, stopping, and reversing anthropogenic climate change. Should we give up?
My point is, it's on a timescale that it isn't useful to discuss as a solution to housing issues.
How about this: housing in places with a shrinking population is relatively cheap and plentiful (math, right?). Developed countries could dial back immigration so that immigration + birth rate is below replacement. That solves overpopulation at the regional level.
So...fuck everywhere else? Sucks to suck?
We do what we can
ah yes i love ecofascism
Where "fascism" is defined as whatever you want it to be, regardless of any reasonable definition. Is renewable energy eco fascism? How about fuckcars? How about forcing densified housing?
Not fascism? How convenient.
Do you have an example of a sustainable single family suburb that exists currently, or ways in which to offset the inherent inefficiency present in such structures?
Why is not living in a suburb austerity? Is all of every city and rural population living in austerity?
Have you ever been to a small city? I can't find a logical way in which a small city surrounded by undeveloped land would be unsustainable.
Do you have to drive to the grocery store? Do you have to commute to work? Do you grow monoculture grass lawns? Are the roads winding instead of straight? Do private lawns create circumstances where to get to the nearest store you have to go multiple times the actual distance to get there? These are all ways in which suburbs are unsustainable.
There's nothing whatsoever wrong with winding roads. Sincerely, a European.
I'd rather be worried if they're straight, are built like highways, and have no sidewalks. If they don't have sidewalks they better be gravel or cobblestone.
Not inherently, no, but in suburbs there is. A 2500ft walk to a store can be 4-5 miles because of the winding suburban streets.
Over here there's tons of small paths that allow you to take much shorter routes on foot or bike. Sometimes official, sometimes the path belongs to a multiple-entries apartment block connected to two streets, or a street and a park, or whatever, in any way you don't know your surroundings without having explored them.
I lived in one of the most viable biking cities in America for sometime, and the paths around and through everything were my favorite part. You could get anywhere in that town and only have to cross 1 or 2 roads, because everything else ran over or under the roads and through beautiful creek paths and walking paths cut through residential and commercial areas alike. Even there, suburbia represents a sort of dead end to all the trails, and you have to bike through miles long streets of housing to get back to a path. Thankfully, there’s great bus routes through those areas, so you can usually get to within a few blocks of your destination even in suburbia.
Where are you getting this absurd, fictitious distance? I've lived in MANY different suburbs and cities. The driven distance is only ever slightly more than the straight line distance. The only consistently true fact is that public transit takes 3-4x as long to go the same places as driving (and I mean in dense urban areas with real transit). It really seems like there's a strawman that fuckcars participants have in their head for just how bad it is to drive places in less dense areas - I promise it's not. Or you just need to find one that isn't shitty AZ/TX/FL new build HOA hell that exists only to enrich a scummy RE developer.
That doesn’t sound like good transit, however real it is. I can go from where I am to the capital of my state on a regional bus in 50m, it takes 1h10m by car, not including parking time. Busses have their own lane and speed limit, they go significantly faster than the flow of traffic.
I live right next to one of the most bike friendly cities in the US, and even there the suburbs are hell compared to the wonderful creek paths and trails present through the rest of the city. Going from walking down a shaded creek path to walking down a scorching concrete jungle is quite a shock, as is suddenly having to figure out which suburban streets dead end and which wrap around and which go through.
You’re also missing the point, you shouldn’t have to drive to get to grocery stores, work, or ANY OTHER place that you need to get to regularly, regardless of how shitty or not the drive is.
If you can’t get to the store without using a car or walking miles, it’s an unsustainable development, period.
That's ludicrous - I don't know which hedgerow maze you're navigating to get to the grocery store. 2500ft is half a mile. You cannot make 0.5 miles into 4-5 miles in any reasonable amount of neighborhood streets, and I have never lived somewhere like that in 6 completely different suburbs in different regions/cities.
In my suburban neighborhood, the straight line, as-the-crow-flies distance is 0.52 miles. The driven distance is 0.7 miles. Everywhere I've ever lived it's proportionally similar, though not always as close. Anyplace with public transit - even good public transit - would require more distance than walking and WAY more time than driving.
Are there just a bunch of people out there living in insaneland (where?!?)? Everywhere I've lived is dense city or completely sane suburbia. Are suburbs just an evil caricature of reality in your mind? Is fuckcars just full of people living in some crazy fictional strawman of a suburban hell?
Many suburbs have a single entrance and exit, so if there’s something behind the suburb near your house, your only choice would be to go all the way to the entrance, then around the entire neighborhood to get to what’s behind it.
There’s varying levels of suburban hell, for sure. It seems like more newly built suburbs near me at least think to put walking paths at all angles through the development, which helps mitigate the issues the long, winding roads can cause. I’d prefer not to build more suburbs at all, though.
This is nothing like places I've been, most of which are not new suburbs
Edit: you probably hate new build suburbs that are imitating old suburbs because the population grew too much in the last 50 years and everyone wanted a slice of the pie
So is your solution global mass genocide just so you can enjoy your sprawling suburbs?
What part of "naturally contract" implies genocide? I swear, the resistance to understanding is willful.
That will take well over a century, if not multiple centuries. We need actual plans for living sustainably now, not hundreds of years in the future.
The 'under 1 billion' part implies genocide, because that is literally never gonna happen - in a time frame where we wouldn't have to rethink housing and nature right now and the next few decades - otherwise without a major worldwide catastrophe. Sure, climate change might take care of it (again, decades away and people need housing now, also, these solutions actually help with climate change) but then we won't have to worry about silly things like housing ever again.
Or we could promote education, contraception, and contraction of the global population the same way we promote renewable energy - because the ideas are related. Or do you think that there's no point in trying to fix the problem? Because you clearly don't seem to hold that opinion about the climate catastrophe, you just refuse to look at population as part of the problem.
Lots of people believe in "drill baby drill"
Fuck em.
Call me when you fucking grow up
No such thing as suburbia doesn't have the density necessary to allow for public transit (with sane frequencies) or to be walkable. Living in there will always mean taking a car to fetch groceries, to get to school, to get to kindergarten, to go to the doctor, to go to the hair stylist, to go anywhere.
Meanwhile you're forcing people to live in accommodations which are absurdly large and expensive because batshit zoning codes make building anything that's not a gigantic house on a humongous plot illegal. I don't want to fucking upkeep a house.
...and I also don't want to finance the sky-high per-inhabitant infrastructure costs that suburbs bring with them. They're the leading cause of municipal bankruptcies in North America.
"forcing", yes that's it. These people hate living in the suburbs and we are "forcing" it on them. Did you ever stop to wonder why suburban houses sell for 2-3x or more of the cost of condos? I'll give you a hint: it's not because people hate single family homes. The anti-car urban zealots don't have a clue that there are people out there that live in pleasant green communities, and yes, have to take the car to the grocery store.
I lived in NYC - an ultra-dense city with incredible transit. I had to walk or take transit to get groceries. Now I live in a suburb, the store is the same distance away, and it takes 1/4 the amount of time to get groceries. Someone save me from these awful car-centric troubles.
You know that there's options besides concrete box in the sky and suburbia, don't you?
With a couple of row houses, multiplexes and small apartment buildings -- think three, maximally five storeys suburbia could be densed up to support public transit. It could support supermarkets in walkable distance, schools, the whole shebang.
But that's illegal in the US.
And guess what? The rare places in the US that have that style of mixed development, places that pre-date the suburbia zoning codes, are the ones with the absolutely highest home prices. Because they're legitimately nice places to live, not because they'd be expensive to build, they're actually very economical.
I've lived in multiplexes and small apartment buildings. For decades at this point. I fucking hate it and I know this is not an uncommon viewpoint. If people hated suburban homes, they would be selling at a discount, which is clearly not the case. You have to pay a premium to live in a less densely populated place and the lack of density is what makes those places expensive and desirable
They'd be even more expensive if not cross-financed by inner city taxes.
But that's not really the point I want to make: You might hate living in a multiplex and really want your detached home. There's nothing wrong with that. Noone's stopping you. Maybe you want space for a shed so you can set up a hobby machine shop or whatever, you do you. What people are pissed about is that it's either that, or the box in the sky. And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it's serving your suburb, you can bike there, there's ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.
From what I heard from the states such places are very popular -- modulo the no car parking thing. They're called open air malls, you have to drive to them and walk through an asphalt desert of a gigantic parking lot and can't, if you so choose, live in an apartment above a store because that's illegal... why?
I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it's worth making this point: "NIMBY" as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:
There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into "low cost housing" or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.
These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don't like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.
Do you oppose development? NIMBY!
Do you support development? NIMBY!
Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.
I think it's bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I'm sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a "NIMBY", I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.
That was a lot of text to complain about the term NIMBY while I could've just as well said "oppose" without any change in meaning.
Fair enough, you're a conservative. Others err in the other direction and want change for change's sake. Some people like to preserve, some like to innovate. In both scenarios, we should add the word "good" to make it a sensible position.
And there's a very specific developmental scenario I painted, and that is to put a tram line into the suburb together with some medium-density development so the station and line has enough people living there to actually see use, see at least a tram each direction every 20 minutes during the day, every 60 or so in the night.
One other alternative? Let me paint a nightmare scenario for you (or rather your wallet): New federal regulations forbid subsidising low density zones with the land taxes from high density zones, from now on you'll have to pay for your own sewage system, streets, electricity lines, etc, the inner city isn't footing the bill any more. Your land tax is suddenly 3-5x higher, if renting, no the landlord isn't going to cover it for you. Tons and tons of people get priced out. Alternatively, your infrastructure rots until it is gone.
Which of those scenarios is a good one, which a bad one? All are changes from the status quo, which, as I said, is suburbia getting subsidised -- a bad scenario, at least in my book, especially given that suburbanites don't exactly tend to be poor.
Last, but not least: Mixed medium-density development is the conservative option. It's how cities have been built for millennia. Suburbia is an invention of post-war North America, driven by car manufactures and redlining. The most expensive places in North America are places old enough to still have that mixed medium-density structure (google "streetcar suburb"), which is the norm everywhere else in the world.
More suburbia does not reduce the number of people. It just spreads them out...into what was formerly nature.