I'm curious how certain things fit into city living.
Examples: Rockband the Game. You can't play that game in an apartment in the city without being a total dick to your neighbors. You can play it in a house in suburbia. Arguably the same is true for the home version of Dance Dance Revolution
Another is room scale VR which pretty seems to demand owning a large enough place to have your VR room. Maybe some people can move stuff to the side one in a while but if you have to spend a bunch of time prepping the room every time I can imagine room scale VR to ever get that popular.
Yes I know the world doesn't revolve around video games but they seem like an example of activities that are designed around sprawl. There's plenty of others, many non-game activities as well that, for lack of a better way to describe it, would compel me to still prefer a suburbian house over a city apartment.
I guess what I'm wondering is how much cultural inertia there is for one or the other
I've lived in various parts of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville and we've previously had rock band and currently have room scale VR (it is, in fact, in use as I write this).
Neither had dedicated rooms but the setup and tear down is manageable. Neighbors never complains about the noise, but we also don't set the bass to room-shaking levels.
Perhaps the most significant difference between my home style in my last ten years and the decade previous (when I was a child/teen in suburbia) is that I share much more space. By pooling four incomes (two six figure tech salaries and two low five figure academia/architecture) we can afford places with enough living space to be comfortable.
It makes sense. When I was a child we at least had four people in our suburban house, but even then, it wasn't anywhere near capacity. With four adults in a four bedroom apartment we get much closer to capacity usage. We also make use of parks, coffee shops, and public libraries (CPL's main branch is beautiful) for more flexible space when necessary.
> By pooling four incomes (two six figure tech salaries and two low five figure academia/architecture) we can afford places with enough living space to be comfortable.
I'm surprised people with six-figure salaries are sharing. Is that common?
In Boston/Cambridge/Somerville it is depressingly common. I wish it were within my means to live alone, but even on six figures it doesn't make sense (I refuse to spend 40-50% of my net income on housing). Having roommates (who aren't romantic partners or family) is the worst. I need sanctuary away from people, and for example, it's frustrating when you want to cook and your cooking equipment is left dirty, when the kitchen is already in use, or when roommates have parties while you're trying to sleep. It's not an issue of having bad roommates, but of having people going about their lives independently in far too close proximity. I used to sleep without earplugs, but since moving to Boston I need to use them every night or I wouldn't ever get a full night of sleep.
Having roommates in one's thirties extends childhood much too far.
For me, density is the enemy, and being near nature is the goal. Unfortunately, jobs are in the city and not in the woods.
The solution should be obvious: get out of Cambridge/Somerville! I recently moved to Malden and was able to comfortably afford a two-bedroom condo on a senior-level tech salary (I pay under 25% of my take-home in housing). It's super quiet and just on the edge of suburbia, but with a supermarket, the gym, the T, and about a dozen restaurants within easy walking distance. I'm a little over ten minutes from an Orange Line T stop (Malden Center) that gets downtown in 28 minutes and the same T stop has a thirty-minute bus to Central. I live super near three different parks, and the one I go to most often is lightly used enough that I can often sit somewhere, surrounded by trees, and not see another person for an hour or so.
I could Uber to Cambridge, round-trip, twice weekly to go out with friends and still be racking up significantly less expenses than I did when I lived in Davis.
A little background: we're a pair of couples, each couple having one of the two higher salaries.
Others have noted the high rent/mortgage prices in the Cambridge/Somerville area. However, each couple could afford the rent on a one or two bedroom. We're privileged to be able to do so; however we choose not to.
Two of the four of us have experienced solitary (i.e. One bedroom, no roommates) living. We all prefer coming home to an occupied house with a pseudo-family.
For my partner and I, children are about a decade away due to the constraints of grad school, early career, and general desire to spend time together before adding a third or fourth person to the mix! Similar feelings lie with the other couple. As such, a traditional family is quite some time away for any of us.
Neither do any of us want to live with our parents for obvious reasons.
And living with just our partner feels, in both cases, a bit too isolated at this point in our life.
I suppose it comes down to the desire for family, togetherness, community. We each have three people on whom we can rely and with whom we live. It's comforting and enjoyable.
Of course we can also save significant money because we split one Internet bill, one rent, and one utility bill. Closer quarters living seems to be a bit more cost-efficient on the heating front. This compounds with the money saved by not owning a car and the economic benefits of easy access to the city's job market.
EDIT: I realize I didn't answer your question! I'm sorry.
It's common among my group of 24-28 year olds who are a mix of grad students and professionals. Most people have at least one non-partner roommate. I cannot think of one person who lives alone in the city.
I do have friends and relatives with apartments in the suburbs who live alone. They tend to have similar feelings to sibling posts here about "being an adult", a very strong desire to own property, and/or cannot stand the cleanliness issues that arise with roommates.
When living in Boston/Cambridge between 2008 and 2015, every apartment I lived in had serious noise issues, and it wasn't just being able to hear too much from neighboring apartments ... it was also hearing people blast music out of their open windows from other buildings or in shared parking areas.
Reporting these noise violations never did anything. The police showed up, asked people to stop, they stopped for 30
minutes then just started up again.
After months and months of this at two totally different apartments, I finally just stopped reporting the egregious noise violations, because what's the use? Probably some disruptively loud neighbor started thinking what you thought -- that if no one is actively complaining then it must be OK, when really it was just worse: the mechanism of complaining doesn't actually help solve the problem so it's of no use.
It's especially bad in older buildings that have been converted into apartments -- which represents a lot of the inventory in Cambridge and Somerville.
Edit: Forgot to add -- city construction noise is also a huge problem, and most cities have specific laws about how much noise construction crews can make and at what times. Inside the permitted limits (even if the limits are actually unreasonable from a human health and well-being point of view) you have no recourse of any kind.
For instance, I usually go on very long runs on Friday nights -- it's one of my weekly exercise and meditation habits. So I tend to sleep in on Saturdays to let my body recover. Being woken up by jackhammers at 9 am on every Saturday for an entire summer was a very miserable experience for me.
First example depends on the quality of the building. I own several well-engineered ones in which you never hear the neighbours except in the worst cases - when having a party with dozens of ppl for example. You hear that ine house over in suburbia as well.
Second one is a size thing, not a building quality. Nit many people have truely 'spare' rooms, you always have to make room for dedicated purposes like this. It remains to be seen if vr rooms will really be a thing, too.
It depends on the design of your building. Good quality apartment buildings, like the steel and concrete one I currently live in, are approximately soundproof. I never hear my neighbors (side, above, and below) and they don't hear me. Same with space -- how much do you think you need such that you can't rent or buy a place with that much?
It seems like you are improperly projecting your limited experience to the general case. Neither sound nor space are inherently a problem with apartments.
To provide a better example, I used to play drums. As much as I'd like to continue practicing, I can't in an apartment complex even if I were to buy an electric kit. The tapping on the pedal would be too much for the people who live below me. This problem, combined with the insane amount of people moving to Atlanta, has me thinking about moving.
Of course, that can be a problem in suburban life too, I remember complaints from our neighbors (well, one particular neighbor) about my brother's drum playing in our house.
I have a friend in SF that just pitched in with his buddies to rent a jam space where they can play as loud as they want without neighbors complaining.
Though you might be surprised at how little sound will travel through a well constructed building (i.e. not wood framed) if you take a little care. I lived in a concrete & steel apartment building for a while, and the upstairs neighbors came down to ask if I could hear them running on their new treadmill, I could not. They had it perched on some thick 6" foam isolating pads and I literally could not hear them running on it at all.
I suspect it's not common in the US, but my apartment is directly above a shop. I can stamp on the floor as much as I like in the evenings and on Sundays, since the shop is empty.
As long as I have my engineering hobbies, I need a house. Trying to do anything non-trivial to a car without a garage is impossible, as is having more tools than a toolbox.
Even so, finding a house that is amenable to my activities is hard :-(
> You can't play that game in an apartment in the city without being a total dick to your neighbors.
What? Why? Just put on good soundproofing in your apartment. If you're living in the center, there's a good chance you already have old-school half a meter brick walls anyway.
The main thing I am looking for is privacy. I find that if I have access to private property big enough to take a short walk in nature, maybe a 10-20 minute walk, then my physical and cognitive health improves by huge amounts.
When I lived in urban Boston, and I would go for long runs on the street and through parks, or I would use a rental car to go out to the Middlesex Fells for geocaching, it was like a poor bastardization of what I needed. There were always people around. I could not get into a meditative mood and access any of the cognitively rejuvenating effects that the activities were for.
It saddens me very much that human culture is moving to agglomerative cities, because I believe I am personally extremely maladapted to be able to handle that, so I constantly feel like I'm being squeezed and stressed, even just by my ambient environment, even on a pleasant sunny day when I just take a walk to relax.
It's a very maddening way to live, but I have not found any solution that would let me live with a better compromise that allows me to have private access to nature on my own property and still successfully interface with the industries I work in.
Ah, but then you can't have a job that lets you live near nature. Even most remote jobs (which have lots of other downsides, like stalling out career progress) require decent proximity to a major city or airport, and high-speed internet.
The denser the city, the closer we could have real nature close to the economic centre of the city.
Think of taking all the Bay Area, putting all the economic activity and people who want city living into a small area with 40 story towers, and the rest will be much more pleasant---with relatively easy commuting into the small core for the voluntary country bumpkins.
I think sprawl will increase when self driving cars become a thing. Long commutes will be a lot more tolerable, parking a non issue, and the cost of owning a car could be reduced with self driving taxis or busses.
I don't think the move from the suburbs to the city is a technology issue. There are certainly trade-offs to both of them.
The reason a lot of people (especially young people) have been flocking to walkable cities has a lot more to do with self-identity and lifestyle choices than with just merely commuting time. No self-driving card will change that.
Keep in mind that the opposite is also true. Self-driving cars make city-living (where owning a car is unaffordable and unpractical) much easier, since it increases the access to cars.
>The reason a lot of people (especially young people) have been flocking to walkable cities has a lot more to do with self-identity and lifestyle choices than with just merely commuting time.
These are drivers to be sure, but the biggest is the network effects of being in a denser metro. The more people there are in a given area, the more human resources: job options, entertainment options, dating options, knowledge-sharing (the form that can only be done via meeting people in person), collaboration, and other forms are human and knowledge-derived capital. It's easier to form a rock band or hire for a startup idea in NYC than it is Duluth, Minnesota where there are fewer musicians and programmers.
This is why rural areas, unless undergoing some sort of unique boom (e.g. the Bakken Formation or Athabascan Oil Sands) or hosting a college/university, sustain much older average populations. Unless one's career allows them to live/work remotely, it's often necessary to move to the city to pursue most career options.
Aside from the self-identity and lifestyle points you mention.
>The reason a lot of people (especially young people) have been flocking to walkable cities has a lot more to do with self-identity and lifestyle choices than with just merely commuting time. No self-driving card will change that.
For me personally having a self driving car would make suburban living much more attractive. For a lot of people having a yard/garage/space to tinker is a really big selling point.
There is a big difference between having to spend an hour driving yourself and having an hour of freeish time to read/watch netflix/do work. I think the other big factor is being able to go out for drinks. Living in the suburbs today means either insane cab bills, having to organize a dd or driving drunk.
People flock to cities now for the same reason they've always flocked to cities - jobs. If you don't need to live in a city to work there, that may make many people move.
And yes young people might prefer to live in denser cities. But when they grow older and have a family, they prefer to move out into a town or suburb.
And beyond that, it's just economics. Cities are expensive. They are inefficient economically. Rent is high, they have higher taxes, and the cost of goods is higher. If you could live outside the city, and conveniently travel there whenever you need to, you could save a huge amount of money.
Cities are crazy efficient economically. Provision of infrastructure and goods is much cheaper in cities. Commuting sucks (and is one of the few clear drags on happiness that persist, unlike becoming a quadriplegic).
Cities are also more productive.
But: cities are financed wrong in most countries. They could easily finance themselves from land value taxes.
Cities are more efficient in theory. In practice, for whatever reason, they tend to have higher costs of living, taxes, and more congested infrastructure/traffic. Until that changes people may be better off economically living away from them.
I think you overestimate the ability of self driving cars to make a long commute tolerable, since driving in a car for an hour (or more) each way is no fun even if someone else is driving.
Getting quality work done is tough if you're at all prone to motion sickness while working on a computer in a moving vehicle, and it's hard to get in quality sleep even in a fully reclining seat.
My wife and I commuted together (45 - 60 minutes) for almost a year and while I could get some work done while she drove, it was not nearly the same as when I'm working from home. Likewise, sleep was not an option, the timing wasn't right (it's hard to wake up, get ready for work, then catch a short on the way to work).
While parking may be less of an issue if your car can go park itself, traffic will become a much bigger issue because all of those cars driving around looking for parking (or another passenger) after dropping off their passengers are going to double downtown congestion (i.e. instead of you driving to your parking garage and leaving your car there, your car is going to stay on the roads until it finds a place to park, perhaps outside of the city)
Not true, when I uber into work (my commute is over 1 hr), it's like a dream come true. I can work, I can relax, I can get my life-admin tasks done with, etc. Right now it's completely wasted. When you commute with other people, it's also annoying because you need to socialize when most times I would rather do the above.
If I could get a self-driving car that worked competently, it would certainly make my commute so much more tolerable.
It's funny how people have different dreams - I changed jobs to one that's a 10 minute bike ride (or 25 minute walk) from home, and that was my dream come true, not being stuck in a car for 2 or 3 hours/day, worrying about whether or not traffic is going to make me late for my morning meeting, or add another hour to my commute home.
Do you really get enough benefit to living 1+ hour from work to make it worth spending 500+ hours in a car (~60 8 hour days)?
I get what you're saying, I had a job that was 15 mins away regardless of traffic, and it made my home life so much easier. But the job sucked and my boss and his boss were both assholes.
Now, I love my job, because the work I have is challenging and a lot of fun. And I love where I live, I have an amazing view and I have no backyard neighbors, it goes off into acres of wilderness, and that's hard to come by in the Bay Area.
I just hate the commute. Being wealthy enough to uber to work everyday would make things perfect, but since I'm not that rich, a self-driving car would come close.
I have it pretty close to a self driving car now, with a company bus that picks me up. It has wifi and bathrooms, so I really don't mind the 1hr commute into the valley every day. It's a good time to get some email done or quietly reflect.
I think that I gladly pay this price to shave 1k a month off living expenses, and probably would for even as low as a few hundred, since it's not really a big cost.
The real downside is in being further away from things that are not work, if you are commuting in for pleasure on the weekends. But based on my experience, I agree with the grandparent and think once more people have drivers, sprawl will increase.
A long commute in a self-driving car, even more than in a comfortable train, can be a part of your work day, or even your leisure. Commute while driving is manual labor, preventing any meaningful concentration, be it watching a movie or writing code.
It is a sad state of affairs when labor is convinced that spending more of their time in a little box (regardless of pilot) in order to show up to work is somehow any sort of leisure at all.
Why is all this tech being used to solve the goal of self-driving cars, and yet remote work is still somehow in the realm of fantasy to most people?
Working remotely can be great; I worked this way for several years.
But not all jobs are like programmer's. Think of e.g. medical personnel, overworked as they usually are, being able to sleep for an extra hour while being taken to / from a hospital. Think of a teacher who could spend an hour of commute preparing to the lessons instead of holding the steering wheel. Think of a plumber who can settle some business affairs while on the road, and spend an extra hour with his kids instead.
because only a tiny amount of the workforce does the kind of hands-off knowledge work than can be done remotely, and without the need for significant employee control.
Long commutes? Once vehicles are self-driving, there will be whole swaths of the population who will simply live in their cars and not have another home. Imagine reddit's "vandwellers" times ten.
Then there will be political fights over city congestion taxes and other ways of extracting money from people who do that.
Unless the self driving cars can make an hour commute be half an hour or less, they'll still suck. All you gain is the ability to read, eat, play games, or even sleep during the commute and no one will be comfortable doing that for a few years.
I've gotten more than one response saying that, but I don't understand it. I would find it very enjoyable to read, play games, or sleep during a commute. There's not that much I can't do in a car, that I can do on my couch. Much more enjoyable than spending hours focusing on the road.
If you move further out of the city, you have much cheaper rent and taxes. Saving that much money would make it totally worth it to spend a few hours in a car everyday.
Relaxing during a commute seems only marginally better than driving. What makes a difference is if you can work during the commute, so an entire 8h workday will be 2h commute and 6h work.
In large metropolitan areas most people will end up spending what they can afford on housing, the choice is just between a 1h commute and large back yard and forest/beach within walking distance, versus the city with short commutes and shops/services within walking distance.
You could live in a small flat in suburbia and save a ton, but it doesn't appear to be a popular choice.
If your company is ok with you working for an hour or two on the way in to the office, then why not just work at home for an extra 90 minutes until after peak commute hours and zip into the office when traffic is light? Or better, just stay home entirely.
Many companies still don't embrace full-time telecommuting (including tech companies like Apple and Google that have unlimited technology resources to make it work), so it's going to take a big paradigm shift for those companies to accept that workers driving in are actually "working" before they get to the office.
My company doesn't offer shuttle buses, but of the people I do know that ride tech shuttles, while they do tend to work on the shuttle, it's usually just catching up on emails before they get to the office to do the "real work", and 2 hours on the bus is not equivalent to 2 hours in the office.
I'm probably about only about 75% as efficient on a laptop as I am with a proper keyboard and large screen. I don't trust developers who work full time on a laptop...
I currently take the train. My door to door is the same as it would be if I drove, to within a few minutes. I choose to take the train because I can read, and so I can sometimes drink alcohol. I've been doing this for almost three years.
In my previous job, taking the train was a longer journey door to door (40 minutes compared to about 25, or 18 minutes once when I wanted to see how fast I could do it and didn't care about jumping the grass embankment to get off the motorway at the motorway service station). I probably took the train about two-thirds of the time, and drove the remainder. Had that job for about four years.
I am but one data point, but I see a lot of other people on the train doing the same thing.
I think it's more likely to increase when remote work (and maybe virtual reality) increases in popularity. When managers finally realise that you don't need everyone in the same office for a 9-5 shift (and the few advantages of such are replaced by something like VR), then I suspect urban sprawl will continue.
Why care about commuting times if commuting isn't as necessary in the first place?
Self driving cars may make travelling easier, but even then you've got to get somewhere. Even then the inside of a car is a less useful working environment than an office, so short commutes would be preferred.
"Walkable" is on the increase because of demographics: there's a slight bulge in under 30s who are more likely to like urban living; once they start having kids the suburbs start to look more enticing.
Self-driving vehicles are likely to increase sprawl by reducing the travel burden :-(
The "let's move where schools are good" is just a self sustaining effect of some sprawling cities. In most countries "inner city kids" or "inner city schools" means the best schools with the richest kids.
If the inner city is attractive then schools will be too.
Not sure if you referred to nature as a net positive or negative? I have a forest an beach nearby (with the commute to suit my very reasonable price point). I think most wildlife is a positive.
Sprawl is a reaction to land rents ( ala Ricardo ). It's really only bad in that it facilitates and encourages commuting. It could be at least partially addressed through the tax system - carbon taxes and land rents taxes combined would probably be enough.
It's an american thing, without any objective reason. As a teenager, I had to commute for an hour (one way) from a distant neighbourhood to a good high school in the city center.
Where does the idea that you should spend 30% of your money on rent come from? I see it everywhere. Not that I'm questioning it in general, but does it ever change?
Ten to fifteen percent is vastly better. It's doable but it's not that easy. You need a middling-good job in flyover country. That's the part that's not that easy - it's harder to justify a gig in flyover country by sheer ability. Companies on the downward slide towards Schumpeterian irrelevance just don't care and so don't bother them with the facts...
IMO, this was what my ( Silent Generation ) parents used as a heuristic. But people saw rising home prices and began the "stretch", and then "stretching" became the standard.
Because of this, I've become somewhat of the Geotaxer fan - if the rent is too damn high, then tax land rents, not income per se. Geotaxes have the aspect that they cannot be passed on to the renter by the rentier.
FWIW, my (half of) rent (split with SO) in Montreal is less than 15% of my net income. And I'm not even in software. People see the low engineer salaries around here and are generally reluctant to come, but I find the quality of life to be high and rent to be low.
Of course, there are other aspects to cost-of-living than rent, and quality of life is somewhat subjective.
EDIT: For anyone curious, here is a nifty heat map of rents in the city:
Funny enough, if tax burdens are shifted from labour and capital to land, land rents will actually increase. (But that's because people will have more net income left to bid up land rents.)
Land rents are depressed by taxes on capital and labour. (Without those taxes, people have more money to bid up land.)
However land rents are not taxed (very much) by themselves, so fall squarely to the owner of the land. So in that sense they are definitely worth chasing today.
The notion one "should" spend some fraction must come the real estate industry.
The rule should be "spend as little as you can on housing to achieve the quality you want (or can tolerate), but never exceed 30% (or other arbitrary percentage) of net income, lest you risk being unable to save for large future expenses and emergencies."
Examples: Rockband the Game. You can't play that game in an apartment in the city without being a total dick to your neighbors. You can play it in a house in suburbia. Arguably the same is true for the home version of Dance Dance Revolution
Another is room scale VR which pretty seems to demand owning a large enough place to have your VR room. Maybe some people can move stuff to the side one in a while but if you have to spend a bunch of time prepping the room every time I can imagine room scale VR to ever get that popular.
Yes I know the world doesn't revolve around video games but they seem like an example of activities that are designed around sprawl. There's plenty of others, many non-game activities as well that, for lack of a better way to describe it, would compel me to still prefer a suburbian house over a city apartment.
I guess what I'm wondering is how much cultural inertia there is for one or the other