For those saying that the density of college campuses simply isn't suitable when many different types of lifestyle converge, I urge you to look at Japan or Europe for an example of density working at scale.
Density doesn't mean everyone is forced to live in a studio apartment either. I live in Tokyo in a 3-story house paying less in rent than I ever did in Atlanta, Seattle, or Ann Arbor. The biggest difference is the expansive train systems, allowing for clusters of shops and restaurants that are accessible without a car. And not a parking lot in sight (good riddance)!
just look at Brooklyn yo.... while it has some tall building, near Manhattan, it is mostly 2-3 story buildings (brownstones) or 4 / 5 smaller apartment buildings, and further down it has single family homes.
It has higher density than SF, Yet is provides lots of public space and it is not car hostile either.
Not everything has to look like either Manhattan, or Surburbian Sprawl like most other cities.
Boston is unique in that area as well, especially around Brookline, Allston, South End, and Cambridge/Sommerville areas as they were built pre-car era.
It think Brooklyn and Boston (especially Cambridge) are the most 'human' scale it gets in the States, and they are fine places to live.
SF is not there yet. The density (is pretty low if you go off downtown) and hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.
It will not get anywhere near the feel of European cities, I've lived in both. Until they fix their serious housing issues with homeless / mentally-ill people camping on sidewalks and creating a hostile environment around the downtown core, it will never attract people to walk or bike.
I lived around SoMa for a decade and I HATE cars with a passion but slowly found myself walking and biking less and less as the years passed. I hated having to constantly scan my surroundings so I don't get mugged / attacked, random ill people screaming or spitting at me and having my locked bike stolen.
The best part about living in European cities was how safe it was to walk or bike to critical places.
> Until they fix their serious housing issues with homeless / mentally-ill people camping on sidewalks and creating a hostile environment around the downtown core...
Which SF (and all other west coast cities) can do by...building more housing.
Stop this bullshit of apartments in a small slice of land area and then single-residence detached housing as far as the eye can see. Build gentle density, walkups and row houses and four floors with corner stores. Don’t crowd density near main thoroughfares.
Build it and house your residents.
Once you’ve done that, the remainder of folks who have genuine mental and substance health issues—as opposed to the people who picked up drugs as a way of coping with the crippling depression of being unhoused—can be cared for properly.
I completely agree with you but this will take decades, at best.
I laugh when I look at the length of projects happening in and around SF, like the Caltrain electrification project (2016-2021?), Van Ness Improvement Project (2016-2022?) and the Downtown Rail Extension (2018-2027?) that got delayed over and over again.
Corruption, incompetence and greed is such bureaucratic red tape in SF that it reminded me so much of the public infrastructure projects happening in Eastern Europe (Romania) where they siphon so much tax money.
Can you imagine how expensive SF would be if it actually got its act together? It boggles my mind to imagine.
> I completely agree with you but this will take decades, at best.
Yup. I lived most recently in Atlanta, where they're on the right track with new projects (and a Microsoft campus to the west), so I expect it to be a much nicer place to live 20-30 years from now. But I'm 25! I don't have time to wait until retirement to enjoy my life!
Seattle is streets ahead of Atlanta, with some promising light rail expansions planned in the future. Again, on a 10-20 year timeline.
I have grown to despise cars so much that I thought it was time to give Japan a try. If I ever leave Japan, I'd sooner move to Germany or the UK than return to America.
I know exactly what you mean, I'm in a similar boat. I can't wait for decades to start enjoying the fruition of something I feel should be standard and already exists in many other places.
It's so strange to me how much I hate relying on cars now because I grew up in Canada and spent the majority of my time driving around everywhere in a suburb. I used to like driving when I didn't have to do it for every little thing but now I despise it and I better understand my environmental impact of constantly starting that engine up.
>Can you imagine how expensive SF would be if it actually got its act together? It boggles my mind to imagine.
SF will never get it together in its current form. The easy tach money being dumped into it breeds perpetual greed and stupidity. The money will have to run out and it will have to crash and burn before they get serious about not sucking. They will have to go through a Detroit phase.
As someone who has lived multiple years in Brooklyn and Boston, this actually does well to explain what I like about both.
I also don't think people understand the density and scope of Brooklyn. It's 5x the people of Boston in a smaller land area, but it's very few traditional skyscrapers. The brownstones really do a lot to give a homey feel to many areas.
+1 for mentioning Cambridge. It's the sweet spot for density. Lots of folks have back yards, but it's still possible to walk/bike where you want to go. I think a lot of folks conflate "urban area" with "financial district"
Not sure where these numbers come from but they're entirely incongruous with my lived experience and that of my friends.
Edit: to be more concrete, you can today buy a spacious 2 bedroom condo in the South Loop right by the El for about $300k (I know because I used to own one). This would basically get you a broom closet if looking for something by the T in Boston (if you're lucky).
You can read more about the methodology behind those numbers on the cited website. They even provide the data behind the statistics for your own review. The purpose of my citation was to provide statistical evidence to counter your anecdotal experience of living in both places.
Especially nicer areas in Boston (and Cambridge) proper have expensive housing. Not Bay Area expensive, but expensive.
That said, a lot of tech and related industries aren't in the city proper. Indeed, it's relatively recent that tech companies started moving back into the city proper after almost completely vacating it. And suburbs range from fairly expensive to, if not cheap, moderate. (I live about an hour west and my house on multiple acres is probably worth in the $400-500K range.
On the topic of cars, I would say that much of Boston and Cambridge is fairly navigable without a car. But it's not a car-free culture like NY largely is. People I know who live in the city but wither commute to jobs outside, visit friends in the suburbs, do outdoor activities in NH and elsewhere all own cars. You can manage without one. I did as a student. But it's pretty limiting, even with Uber, ZipCar, and so forth, if you want to leave the city on a regular basis.
Well my experience is colored by having moved here from Chicago, which is a city with a lot more going on, while at the same time having at least 40% lower housing cost. Prices are quite comparable to those in parts of say Brooklyn, but there's almost no cool cultural sustenance to make up for it. Just a bunch of biotech bros, doctors and university students.
I could see that. Visiting from the Bay I was blown away by Chicago. Every facet of that city seems studded with cultural gems, whether that be public spaces, museums, public art, history, architecture, nightlife.
The area is colonial in age, but has thousands of college students and thousands of highly paid professional workers. This means both the apartment and the housing markets have huge demand, and people simply pay, because the alternative is to commute through terrible traffic and extra 60 min daily.
That's true although many (probably most) of the tech-related jobs are not actually in the city. In my experience, most people working in those jobs live in the suburbs/exurbs (and even in NH). It's mostly the branches of the west coast companies that are in the city as well as other industries like finance and healthcare.
For the most part you don't. Anyone with a space intensive form of recreation (arguably this included raising a family) has to slog out a commute from the suburbs.
Yes there are some single men in their 20s with table saws in their living rooms but they're the exception and not the rule.
I think this is one reason you get people talking at cross-purposes about living car free.
Leaving aside where their job actually is... (Which, in the case of many cities may well not be in the city in the case of tech-related jobs.)
People tend to bias their activities to what they can do relatively easily. If you don't own a car and don't have a lot of space, you're probably not going to take up some space-intensive hobby or head off on a lot of weekends to hike or canoe. Maybe you'll lean a bit on friends with cars--though that tends to get harder as people get older and busy with their own activities. And maybe you'll rent a car now and then. But mostly you'll fall into activities that don't have a lot of overhead associated with them.
I don't have a car, but the city I live in has an excellent car sharing system. I just checked, if I wanted to go hiking tomorrow, the nearest suitable car that's available all day is 200m from my place. Booking it for 8 hours and driving 100km would cost me 33€ ($41), all costs included. The key is in a lockbox that opens with a card, so it's available 24/7/365 without another human in the loop. Booking is easy and convenient. If the weather were any good tomorrow, I might have done that and gone winter hiking. Not having a car doesn't have to be as limiting as you may think :)
Car-sharing (and Uber) definitely make it easier to live car-less in a city, at least at the margins. I know a couple in SF who don't own a car but they make pretty regular use of car-share. (Although last I heard they had their ZipCar account suspended for a minor accident and the alternatives or not as good.)
I still stand by the broader point though. To the degree that you don't really have the space for hobby/recreational gear and that it's harder to transport the things you need for activities, the less likely you are to do them.
I live in Brooklyn and have made multiple trips to Home Depot, via subway actually even! If I needed to take bigger loads, zipcar + 10 minute drive. No landscaping but I can chill on my backyard with a garden behind my brownstone. If I really wanted to make furniture out there I could probably manage. For smaller pieces of wood, I can pick from 4-5 hardware stores in a 10 minute walk radius.
We have a hardware store within a five minute walk. Most small things we can get there.
Lowe’s is about 15 minutes away, and is the only place to get serious wood. For small things we’ll walk there and back. For medium things we’ll walk there and UberXL back ($15), for large things we’ll zipcar or rent a UHaul ($25).
We don’t have private outdoor space, but we live in a very quiet neighborhood. For woodworking we get very far with a dremel and a jigsaw. :)
While they have their place, I don’t think they’re scalable unless you’re talking about proliferating a lot of small ones. Beyond a certain number of people you get a real tragedy of the commons situation and you have to start enforcing rules and resolving disputes.
I've never been to Boston but the description you give sounds a lot like London to me. Within the M25 (inner ring), London is mostly 2-3 story terraced houses with a few apartment buildings (don't think they go bigger than 8 stories) and taller social housing buildings. It's mostly dense but also plenty of green space and each neighbourhood feels mostly like a village within a city: ie a local high street, parks, schools, halls, religious centres etc within 15-30min walking distance. Of course it's not perfect and pre-pandemic the Tube was insane, but I'll take it over living in a car-reliant suburb any day.
As someone who's lived in both SF and BK, I agree.
One other point I'd like to add that makes BK more 'human scale' compared to SF is the speed at which cars travel. BK traffic (for the most part) moves significantly slower than SF traffic. There aren't as many uninterrupted stretches of road in BK where motorists can speed up to 50 mph. This makes BK (and Manhattan where traffic moves significantly slower than both) a safer place to walk and bike. Furthermore, the hilly topography of SF creates unique blind spots that the flat expanse of simply NYC doesn't have.
IMO if it's less than 3 stories I wouldn't call it a brownstone. I guess park slope has some shorties but those are weird outliers.
> it is not car hostile either
Car hostility is a feature not a bug. Even at smaller scales.
Brooklyn suffers from the Els that were removed in the 1970s and never replaced, btw.
> hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.
I feels a hellavalot like Lisbon, actually. Hills and coastline are great for forcing us foolish humans to use land efficiently.
(My theory is that hills actually helped, not hurt, economic growth in Japan, Korea, and somewhat Taiwan in the end. It's like the opposite of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse curse.)
I bet it helped California too, and would help more if it weren't for the Central valley release valve.
Hills are great for aesthetics too. I grew up in the a flat Midwestern suburb so I'll never grow tired of biking to the top of a hill and gazing miles into the distance, watching the city confirm to each and every wrinkle of the geography. With mountains on the horizon... Why would I ever choose to be anywhere else?
I read somewhere that 3-5 story buildings make up the bulk of density, even in cities that are famous for their high-rises. High-rises are too expensive to live in for most people; even after adjusting for sky-high land cost.
In Brooklyn, at least, the 1-2BR high rises are currently cheaper than the comparable apartment in a 3-5 story building.
There was a huge construction boom in the last 5 years, and then COVID cratered demand for the kinds of people who live in those buildings. They’re currently listed 20-30% below what they were going for before.
The brownstone market has been affected too, but the good ones have not gone down much in price.
Unfortunately they're only cheaper for 12-24 months because those listed rents are net effective rents, not actual rents. So you're typically paying a very high monthly but getting several months free.
It depends on the building. What you're saying is true during non-COVID times, but things have shifted since April.
City Tower, for example, has been listing several incentive-free rents in the $2000s. We were moving during this time and actually looked into it to confirm, because we didn't believe either. (I know, it's crazy!)
Yeah COVID has really tweaked the normal incentives.
A lot of these big buildings are very new, and are sitting way below projected occupancy.
They just need cash flow to pay their debts.
In contrast, most brownstone owners have only maintenance and taxes to pay. So they have fewer units to move, can afford to sit on vacancies, and have a relatively unique commodity on the market.
Interesting. While I haven't lived in Japan, I have spent a month there.
Obviously there aren't nearly the number of parking lots as in America, by far. But you can totally find large garages in some areas (parked in a large 7 or so story garage in Yokohama once), malls with large parking lots out in areas like Gunma, and even "hidden" garages in Tokyo (or other cities like Takasaki, even) where you pull into a little open garage area, and then there's an attendant who helps you drive the car onto a lift which is basically in the center of the building, which then "automatically" (or manually by the operator) stashes cars in a multi-level car park hidden inside the building.
Plus tons of teeny 2-car or whatever lots do exist, they're just scattered.
I realize in terms of scale that's still quite less than in America, which makes sense. But there are definitely parking lots and garages in Japan. :)
Yes. I've lived for several decades in densely populated parts of Tokyo and Yokohama. While many people do have cars in these areas, most walk, bike, or use public transportation for most purposes. I myself have never had a car and cannot even remember the last time I rode in a private automobile in Japan—probably more than ten years ago.
But a few years ago, I started traveling around Japan more than I had before, using only trains, buses, and occasionally taxis. Once one leaves the major urban areas, I discovered, life is nearly as car-centric as in the suburban United States: almost everyone drives, the main roads are lined with big-box commercial businesses surrounded by parking lots, and a lot of people live in places that are unaccessible except by car. Even if a place is served by trains or buses, they might run at only one- or two-hour intervals, making a trip to the grocery store a half-day errand.
An interesting business I learned about recently is individually owned parking spaces that are leased out in fifteen-minute increments to people who reserve them through a smartphone app [1]. My own house in Yokohama has a small parking space that we never use, and my daughter has suggested that we sign up to lease it out through that service. Some of our neighbors have done so already. The business is feasible because there is no free parking anywhere nearby.
I know someone who works for a company that runs a similar business for bicycle parking spots [2].
What you're saying isn't true for Europe, actually. It's true that in Tokyo you can live far from the center of Tokyo and still have a lively neighborhood around the station, and reliable train to commute to the inner-Yamanote area. You still suffer if you need to commute because the trains are packed at peak time (station staff literally pushing people in so the doors can close).
In Paris however, you either live in Paris itself (roughly the size of the Yamanote line) but it's crazy expensive especially if you have kids and need a bigger appartment, or you live in the suburbs that are mostly just housing and train (RER & Transilien) is unreliable.
If you want to live in the "15-minutes neighborhood" with everything, but can't afford to live inside Paris or down town of a big metropolis, you need to move to a middle-size city but then getting a job in your area is more difficult.
It may not be for Paris, but in my experience it is for most Spanish cities - there's usually a clear centre of course, but also many small self-contained walkable neighbourhoods distributed throughout the city.
It'd be interesting to find a good metric to be able to compare cities and explore this.
Same here in most Dutch cities, I myself don't live near the city centre but still have a self contained neighbourhood with a ton of schools shops and other facilities. And the public transport is good enough to be able to reach the entire metropolitan area for a job.
Would be a nice research if someone could test different cities and neighbourhoods indeed.
This is why its so ironic to me that people celebrate europe, nyc, etc as some dense model for the world, when they too arent building to meet supply and refusing to upzone while local leaders benefit from their property assets exponentially rising in price, same as a suburban US city with the only high rises being offices.
As well as the huge danger of street side parking with drivers swerving in/out and opening doors without looking.
In my city there is a single city block which has no roads (special vehicle access only) and consists of a bunch of high rise apts buildings with restaurants on the bottom level.
I stumbled on this area by accident and I was blown away, it was like I had walked in to an alternate universe. There were a group of kids playing in what looks like your typical suburb parkland except this is right in the middle of the city which would normally be packed out with cars and concrete. Makes me wish more of the city was like this.
> The biggest difference is the expansive train systems
Railways are allowed to grow organically in Tokyo and Japan:
> Outlying and suburban areas are served by seven private railway companies, whose lines intersect at major stations with the subway system. More than sixty additional kilometers of subway were under construction in 1990 by the two companies.
Is the cost of housing just much cheaper than people expect it to be or what? I'm surprised to hear it's lower than Atlanta which is where I currently live.
Yes, I think Tokyo being expensive is one of the myths westerners like to repeat about Japan.
One reason, I think, for this misunderstanding is that Tokyo is laid out quite differently from American cities. Space is used very efficiently and you can live quite far from central Shibuya / Shinjuku / Chuo while maintaining a 20-30 minute commute by train.
Another factor is that in Tokyo, most people do not own a car. Commuting by train is significantly cheaper than owning a car, and many companies will even pay for your train pass.
A quick google shows that software engineers in Tokyo can expect to only make 6.6M yen on average (going as low as 2.2M yen or as high as 8.8M yen). That's around $65k on average with the highest being around $85k.
I can find those same jobs for 2x the salary in Atlanta any day of the week.
You're right that software engineering is currently much more profitable in the US, but as far as careers go SWE is a bit of an anomaly. Most other careers don't have nearly the same pay disparity, if any.
That said, many companies that hire American SWEs tend to pay better, especially if you have experience working at a big Silicon Valley tech company. Pre-covid there were quite a few job postings for senior developers above the $100k usd mark, which will get you quite far in Tokyo.
Salaries in Japan are very flat compared to the US with high-paying jobs often only paying 30-50% more than low-skill jobs. I'd also note that US minimum wage is $7.25 while Japan minimum wage is $8.67.
Things are also different because relatively few married women are in the work force. From that, you could say that the average pay in Japan is much higher. In the US, wages stagnated for a couple decades and cost of living skyrocketed in the US as women entered the work force until it now takes 2 salaries to stay afloat vs only one in Japan (we'll exclude the unofficially high poverty rates).
At the same time, US workers put in 41.3 hours per week for men and 36.3 hours per week for women (working 14% less time accounts for an enormous part of the earning difference between the sexes). In contrast, while the law officially puts the work day at 8 hours with statutory paid leave going up to about 3 weeks, most workers take little to no vacation and "voluntarily" work many more days and 30-50% longer hours per day than the US worker (though at the same time, productivity per hour may not always be high).
Haha typed on mobile, my bad. The trains are pretty cheap compared to the cost of car ownership in America. From another comment I wrote:
> I live pretty far from central Tokyo and for between 200-350yen one way I can get to Shinjuku / Shibuya / Ikebukuro / Ueno and everywhere in between. So that's 400-700yen round trip for a night out.
> In Seattle or Atlanta? You'd be extremely lucky if your destination within a 15min walk of a bus stop or train station. In Atlanta good luck not getting mugged while waiting for the bus at night. Uber typically costs $10-15 one way (although to be fair you can split the cost between friends if you're travelling together).
> Or if you own a car in the US, you can reliably get from A to B, but you're paying between $5-10/day for insurance (whether you use the car that day or not) and $10-20 to park if you're in a city.
I think the points made in the article are fine, there is something to the way colleges facilitate community and their physical design encourages walkability and enables that... but I would offer one caveat to this which cities should avoid when considering what to imitate and what not to.
I have noticed a correlation between excessive building costs and campaigns and the two industries whose prices have most outpaced inflation the last 20 years: healthcare/hospitals and education/colleges.
Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day. (This also manifests in a lot more time-consuming walking to get around due to the lower density of usable space.)
This trend is neither wise nor sustainable nor just. And college administrators should be held accountable for it, not given a pat on the back for raising money and spending it (despite the nice line on their resume). Alternate metrics of success should be culturally encouraged and measured.
How could this be done? I don't know if LEED certification (which is an award given to buildings meeting various sustainability/efficiency criteria and has Gold/silver/bronze-type ratings which are thus indirectly a bragging right mentioned by anyone in academia who gets buildings built) measures actual building utilization... I suspect not. Typically LEED covers initial construction and is awarded at the end of construction, and thus could not include use-after-buildout metrics/grading, but LEED or something like it should attempt to measure something like that, and that should be a sign of true administrative competence (and also efficient use of donor funds by the way.)
I wonder if the very sensors which are used to shut off lights when people aren't around and any "energy/CO2 savings metrics" from those sensors could be cheaply repurposed and inverted to also measure the creation of just such a building utilization metric (look how much carbon we wasted and continue to waste heating/cooling a building people aren't using?)
Part of the problem is that rich people want to leave behind a lasting legacy, and what better way than buy a building for the campus. At my alma mater, someone got a building named after them despite only donating a fraction of its construction costs, let alone maintenance. No doubt the ballooning tuition costs are subsidizing this man's legacy.
Paraphrasing James Madison, he wrote the future owed a debt to the past for their achievements.
I disagree, and align more with Thomas Jefferson; the dead do not rule the living.
Having to shoulder the burden of war and industrial debt on a “generational distributed ledger”, which is so clearly biased to favor entrenched power is unsustainable.
Indeed, that’s is, IMO, why most empires fail, and revolutions take place.
I think we should end all charitable tax deductions for people above a certain net worth. They use that tax advantage either for their vanity or else to convert their money into influence.
Think of Bill Gates in the 90’s vs now. He has far more influence than he ever had, and a large part of it is because of the money he was able to put at a huge tax advantage into his foundation. He probably has a direct line to dozens of heads of state. He probably influences policy across many countries. True, he has used that influence for good, but he got a lot of it at a massive tax advantage.
Unless you know of some secret section in the tax code, it's not a "2 for 1 deal" - if Bill Gates donates a billion dollars to a charity, it makes sense that it wouldn't be taxable; it's no longer his money. Typically the tax code reduces your income by money for which you don't actually have constructive use.
There are certainly other things like 'in-kind' donations which may reduce tax obligations without necessarily providing a commensurate value, but putting money into bona fide charitable works are not among them.
That is one of my contentions. Although it is technically no longer his money, he still has a significant amount of control over how it is spent, and that money increases is political power and influence.
And it is not just Bill Gates and a foundation. If I donate $50 to a charity, it is unlikely I have any influence. It is truly not my money.
If however, I donate $50,000,000 to a charity, I exert a lot of control with that money. I can have a huge influence on the direction of the charity, and even likely get somebody fired or appointed to the board of directors.
I am not saying those donations should be illegal, just that we should see that it is different qualitively from a regular donation and not give it tax advantages.
I can think of no reason to believe Bill Gates wouldn't still have a huge foundation, with the attendant influence, even if he'd been unable to take advantage of some (fairly minor in the grand scheme of things) tax savings along the way.
Before that it might be wise though to have the government actually provide the services that charities are providing at the moment. Paying off medical debt, investing in medical research, running UBI experiments, funding basic care for homeless or the poor or children - much if not all of this is left to philantropists and churches at the moment. For what it's worth, citizens are running fundraisers for essential services like police and firefighters - so many that fraud is so rampant that the FTC has its own advisory page (https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0085-fundraisers-calli...). Or school funding, where citizens have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in some instances to keep them open (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_fundraising).
Cutting tax deductions would likely eliminate a significant portion of that spending, leaving those depending on it pretty much screwed. And that doesn't even include outright shit like police funds coming out of "asset forfeiture", leading to heaps of abuse.
From an European point of view, so much of what I wrote above is... mind boggling.
> Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day.
I will be 40 later this year, and I continue to live next to the University I started attending over 20 years ago: the University of California, Santa Barbara. I mean, right now, campus is empty due to COVID-19; but, right before the world switched to "everything from home", I am pretty sure that we had almost no free capacity... campus keeps buying and renting building as they need more classroom space, study space, and living space. Yes: there are a lot lot lot more buildings, and the footprint of the campus is much larger; but the entire campus is packed with people... the #1 thing that feels weird about it is not that the campus feels empty, but that the campus feels completely and utterly full despite all the new construction. The core areas of campus now have a ridiculous number of people swarming through them constantly, and people are now sometimes living four to a room in buildings where, when I was a student, there only had started to be rumors that someone might be in a triple somewhere (again: despite there having been a very large number of new housing projects built in the last couple decades). I just can't track anything about your point here with my lived experience.
I can tell you that despite what you might figure, buildings really do get used. I went to a massive university with 50k people, and a campus so big it took a half hour to traverse yet was packed with massive buildings the whole way. For the most part the buildings would be booked up during the regular term, but during exams, then they were absolutely maxed. All the study spaces in the 13 story main library, 6 story engineer library, and all the other scattered libraries would be full. There would be no free chairs at all. People would resort to studying in empty classrooms during finals, which usually worked better since you had a closed off room to meet with your group, space, AV hookup, whiteboards, etc.
If there wasn’t a need for more and more rooms in a college, they wouldn’t get built. It’s not some conspiracy.
The college that first triggered this observation/concern was one such 50k public state university, but the observation was alumni-based, not student-based and I recognize mileage may vary across schools and appreciate your comment.
My concern is not of a conspiracy, but of misplaced incentives that have gone awry. (And which are slated to get even worse if we start periodically forgiving loans which I have mixed feelings about.)
My perception is that college/university prices have drastically outpaced inflation since inflation shrunk in the early 1980s and the quality of education provided has not concomitantly increased.
At least some analyses from the National Board of Economics Research show that from 1987-2010, "expansions in borrowing
limits drive 40% of the tuition jump and represent the single most important factor [of tuition increases from 1987 to 2010]" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21967/w219..., page 4.) and "We also find that
increased grant aid contributes 17% to the rise in tuition"
Tuition increase is not directly related to the subject of campus design and spending on campus buildings, but is part of the origin of my skepticism and critical eye towards college/universities as a societal model, the thesis of the original article.
Cities and universities serve very different populations. A university typically has four groups it serves: students, faculty, administration, and staff. Each of these groups tend to have only small variations in needs within their group. If you can design for the needs of these four groups, you're doing well. A city on the other hand may have hundreds or even thousands of different groups of differing conflicting needs. Even a smallish city with a population of 20,000 is going to have more complexity than a large university with 40,000 students plus several thousand in the other three groups.
You design the urban environment where, with-in a fifteen minute walk, you have grocery stores, butchers, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pubs, a library, dentists, doctor offices, elementary school, bakery, flower shops, etc.
It's not that hard: we were doing it for a long-time before WW2.
Toronto is a bad example for sane housing, you have to pay over a thousand dollars for a single room that gets sunlight and the prices just kept rising until covid
The parent also mentioned Jane Jacobs who a lot of people like to remember for getting highway construction blocked and, as they say, supported walkable neighborhoods that were communities. I would also guess that Jacobs would also have been perfectly fine with Wet Village "NIMBYs" blocking high-rise residential construction if they didn't want it. Livable neighborhoods probably correlate better to high housing prices than low.
Toronto is a good example where you can decent density without high rises.
The fact that so much land was wasted building low-density (North York, Scarberia) sub-divisions (not even getting into McCallion and her disaster of Mississuaga) now means there is high demand but limited supply. Of course now the regions of Peel and Durham (etc) have 'found religion' with regards to density.
It's also a bad example of density for a major North American city. Toronto (4,334.4/km2) has lower pop. density than San Francisco (7,255.12/km2), and Boston (5,531.93/km2) and its nearest comparison is probably Chicago (4,573.98/km2).
Faculty and staff rarely live on campus. Often they live in suburban enclaves and drive to campus. They also tend to have spouses with jobs elsewhere and children who don't go to school on campus. Faculty parking can be one of the most contentious issues for any college or University.
This idyllic myth of presented a college campus is only true for the students.
Notably, many college campuses seem to offer most of these services already: food courts restaurants, and cantinas, small retail for student and faculty needs, utility buildings, housing (undergraduate and graduate, including for students with families), childcare centers for the children of students and faculty, office space (duh), gyms and pools (which HN is fond of ranting at), access to medical services, green spaces, campus fire and police, and park-like green space around campus, and competing services in many of these categories located just off campus.
Speaking for myself, I've never seen a campus with all of: A full grocery store. Elementary, middle, or high schools (with associated sports facilities). Jails. Courthouses. Hospitals (not basic medical services, fully featured hospitals with Ambulance support). Police forces (not half a dozen campus cops, or loaned police officers)... and so forth.
And remember, we're discussing building cities like campuses - there is no "just off campus" space available for competition.
We're discussing campuses the size of Manhattan Island, without most of the roads (which will hugely impact the ability to deliver goods and take away waste; just see how New York is taken over by these two activities at night). Also, without suburbs, so the housing (and all of the support necessary for that population) needs to be that much more dense (and affordable).
I think it's interesting that your list omits industry/manufacturing/construction, typically very space- and vehicle-intensive. Industry is no longer a part of the urban core of a lot of cities in the west (and it can have significant negative externalities for the folks living around it), but it really needs to be solved in order to reduce car dependence.
i'll take a stab at what the author of that comment might have meant - how I understood it at least
there are 2 ways you can define "walkable"
1. it is physically possible to walk there - e.g. there are paved sidewalks
2. it is convenient to walk from the place you are to the place you need to be
i think that the misunderstanding here might be that you and the comment above are thinking about 1 while the problem is actually 2
to pull a quote from the article:
"students who live in dormitories are able to work, eat and worship all within walking distance of their homes"
there's also a link to this concept of a "15 minute neighborhood"[1] where everyone can walk to their basic daily needs w/in 15 minutes, or beautifully summarized as “Put the stuff closer together so it's easier to get to the stuff.”
so the proposed problem is that the set of things w/in that "daily needs" category, AKA the "stuff", might grow, due to the increasing diversity of the population you're servicing, to a point where its not possible to give that to everyone
Also they aren’t considering Stanford which has one of the largest campuses by Area and you need shuttles to get from one area to another (even excluding the nature preserves).
Stanford is a perfectly fine example. I used to visit Stanford several times a week. Walking briskly, you can cross the core of campus, where most of the instructional buildings are, in about 15 minutes from one end to another. The athletic center and undergraduate dorms are located around the periphery of this core. I assume students don't typically go back to their dorms multiple times per day. The engineering campus is pretty compact. The medical complex is, yes, another brisk ten-minute walk, but I doubt many students need to go between the hospital and the rest of campus more than once a day. If your daily schedule takes you from the dorms to the core of campus, and then to the hospital, and then to the campus gym, and then to the student union or the main library, then yes, maybe you'll choose to take a shuttle. But for an able-bodied person, these are very reasonable distances to travel on foot, and certainly on a bicycle or scooter.
For comparison, I went to a university with a much smaller campus, and it was still at least a ten-minute walk from one end to another. And it was fine.
I live in a small college town (Golden, CO) and I love biking through campus, or, when the weather is nice, sitting under a tree and reading a book for a little while.
I'd love for some of those design patterns (grassy streets, walking paths more than roads, etc) to percolate outwards into the rest of Golden.
One big thing this article overlooks is that colleges are free to ban anti-social people from their campus. Cities are not.
There are fairly string rules for college and if you step over the line, you can be expelled and trespassed from campus with much lower burden of proof than a criminal trial.
I have noticed as density of a people living together goes up, there is more need for conformity. Singapore and Japan have some of the nicest high density cities in the world, but they also have one of the highest rates of people being conformant.
One final issue is pandemics. College campuses have had a horrible rate of transmission when students have been there, so much in fact that a lot of schools kept students from returning to campus for schooling making them take online classes.
It seems that many obtrusive anti-social behaviors would pertain to actions inside the home and there have always been bylaws and standards when living in apartment or condo buildings (eg noise, pets, grills/fire hazards). That being said, this still limits individual freedoms non-trivially.
Colleges have of tens thousands of people doing a quite limited number of things - mostly classes and teaching, with some support staff or service easily placed around campus. It's easy to plan for that. I'd guess most campuses in the US can easily be walked across multiple times a day. I went to Purdue, W. Lafayette, about 40K students, and didn't need a car. One could walk between classes and dorms and food trivially.
Cities of hundreds of thousands to millions of people have easily thousands and thousands of varying jobs, different size and scale employers, a huge range of skilled and unskilled labor, a vast array of specialists and specialty employers, and even several entire campuses - a massive amount of different requirements. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to have employment within close range, so immediately people need cars to commute. It's not reasonable to put some large employers evenly mixed with housing - no one wants the garbage facility or any of a host of companies next door. Many companies also have huge inflow/outflow requirements like trains, shipping, power, waste, again complicating the picture, since people need to travel larger distances to reach them. Zoning laws didn't just pop up to prevent campus living everywhere - they popped up to solve the issues that occur when living and industry was co-mingled.
So while I'd love to have all of life be as serene and pretty as a top university, I also prefer to have specialized jobs and places to do such work, and I don't see how these can possibly be merged.
College life and real life have no comparison. Students are cramped in small dorm rooms shared by multiple people, many with shared public bathrooms. Students "work" (attending class/studying) at small place, chairs with a small board as desk in classroom or small desks in library. There's one or a few shared cafeterias on campus. Close to no variety shops on campus. In almost all aspects of campus life, things and spaces are cramped and choices are few. Students only endure it because they know it's only for a few years. People don't want to live or work like a student for the rest of their life. Plus the cost of college has spiraled out of control year after year.
Another point is that college students do not all live on-campus and in dorms.
Depending on the school, it's possible to live in the dorm the first year, and possibly move to another form of housing or off-campus as time goes on.
Many students put up with the dorms and roommates because they don't know any better at first. When they do know better, they work out other arrangements with a little more room (and fewer rules)
Exactly right. Couple that with the various types of work people are required to do and it's a doubly bad thesis. On my street alone, my neighbors include an oil field worker, a landscaper, a steel factory worker, and a UPS driver. So while the human-scale idea might work for white-collar office jobs (analogous to college campus life), there's no way it works for other professions that require separation distances for safety or logistical reasons.
Before the suburban boom, we tried human scale with dangerous or large-area jobs with company housing, stores, etc. and it resulted in high prices and monopolies. Given the choice, I'll pay for the roads and sit in traffic.
Neither oil field worker nor steel factory worker will work at the exact place where he is having bedroom. Both have to travel further away regardless of how human-scale their houses/flats are in.
Once they are home, they both benefit from shops, restaurants, gyms, green spaces and what not within walking distance. Their kids benefit from the same. They themselves benefit from not having to drive their kids everywhere.
I enjoyed my time living on campus and I understand the authors point, but a college campus is the ulitmate elitist gated community.
Imagine a city that required you pass an IQ test, submit your high school grades and an essay, ask for the last 2 years of tax returns and credit history, scanned your social media posts and reviewed all your hobbies and extra-ciricular activities before they would consider letting you become a resident. Then, once you moved in, they would monitor your speech and other activites to make sure they were up to community codes and standards. College campuses make suburbia look like Burning Man.
Yeah let's not forget how many people take out massive debt (which they often struggle to ever pay back) just to be part of this gated community for 4 years.
It's not a good example for someone to think of at first.
Can they be? Everyone who has tried has failed AFAIK. Milton Keynes here in the UK was a "Garden City", it's become a byword for soullessness and low livability. Meanwhile London, the uncontrollable millenia old mess, goes from strength to strength...
But London is rather un-american in its practicalities right? It's a total expensive pain to drive, as roads are narrow and there's a 20usd a day fee to do so. But public transport is great and wherever you live there are walkable amenities.
I think it depends on your definition of American. New York isn't that different (heavily train using, very limited parking, but on a grid pattern). I get what you mean though, NYC is an exception really.
There is a "rule" about how cities get "stuck" on the transport type they use when they reach a certain size. Hence NYC and London are (mid distance) train centric. Newer cities in the western US are car heavy. Singapore is metro rail.
But 54% of London households own at least one car. [1] That's in the same ballpark as Manhattan. And everyone I know if the UK outside of London own car(s). Europe generally is less car-centric than the US but lots of people still own cars.
As a person who has spent a great deal of time in rural areas, I don't think I would be happy in the long term living in cramped apartments. Too much noise and too many people.
In the suburban sprawl in which I live, the 10-12 feet between houses seems too close. Yet as much as I long for space, I will always be tied to some metro, with access to healthcare and cultural outlets.
I think people that make this argument against apartments fail to appreciate the difference that a quality construction makes.
I lived in early 2000's apartments where I could hear my upstairs neighbour blasting drum and bass in the stairwell. However, I could hear literally nothing once I closed my apartment door.
I have also lived in a 1930's terraced house where I could literally hear my next door neighbour coughing.
Construction quality matters a lot more than how cramped or not your housing conditions are.
Counter-example: They designed the Bijlmer neighbourhood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmermeer) to be pedestrian-friendly, with parks, walkways between the buildings, and no cars allowed. But it didn't really work out.
Isn’t this more of a high-rise failure. The first picture from the link shows some rather monumental structures that tower over occupants and users of green spaces. Later in the Wikipedia article they talk about tearing some of these down.
As well as amenities, green spaces etc there is always a requirement for buildings to be of ‘human’ scale for it to feel liveable.
Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place. Centralised planning tends to be too rigid and once a failure becomes apparent it is difficult to re-plan without sacrificing some other amenity.
>Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place
That's certainly true and is basically one of the things Jane Jacobs argued for. Note, though, that doesn't necessarily lead to dense housing/inexpensive housing which is what many of the urbanist folks who comment here care a great deal about.
>"There are many reasons why the college environment facilitates relationships and personal connections. Everyone there is at a similar age and stage in life. Classes and majors tend to group students by interests and personality traits. There is also a relative freedom from responsibility. One factor often overlooked, though, is the structure of colleges themselves.
Because of their scale and walkability, college campuses meet human social needs in a way that is impossible for many of our nation’s towns and cities."
This is a very important understanding for future city/urban planners!
One thing universities have little of is small children. MIT's married student housing isn't large and is off to one side. There is no faculty housing beyond the president (all of whom have had no kids or adult kids). Stanford's married student housing (and the faculty neighborhood) is a larger percentage and includes playgrounds, rec facilities and even two elementary schools. Still, it's less family friendly than Palo Alto or Menlo Park.
Take it from someone who grew up in a comparable suburb (if anything more kid-friendly than those two), but also spent a substantial amount of time in a more walkable city in Mexico:
Places like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are terrible for children of all ages. San Francisco or Cambridge near the MIT campus would be a much cooler place to grow up. (Though unfortunately these places are getting less diverse every year, as housing becomes increasingly unaffordable.)
Because everyone travels by car, children in suburbs are completely dependent on adults. There are few things to do, and many kids are end up stuck at home or carted from one over-scripted activity to another by overwhelmed parents. Their social lives are strongly circumscribed, with little chance to make cross-age connections. Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities, where they can be more independent and there are more available resources and activities relevant to every kind of interest and hobby.
Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars. Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Yuppie parents of school-aged children say they are moving to the suburbs for the sake of their kids, but it is more about their own convenience and biases/preconceptions.
To the hellbanned person who replied here saying that San Francisco is too dangerous for kids:
You are right that San Francisco is expensive, and this causes many families to leave. But it is not any more dangerous than suburbs or other cities (and significantly safer than rural areas), it is dense enough that there are many other kids around (many parts of the city have more kids within walk distance than a typical suburb), and kids will not be harmed if they see weirdly dressed (or weird undressed) people sometimes.
The biggest mortal danger kids face in the USA is cars. Followed by guns and various kinds of home accidents (drowning in pools and spas is a big one).
> San Francisco or Cambridge near the MIT campus would be a much cooler place to grow up.
Not sure how recently you may have been to San Francisco but it is not a place I'd take my kid (I live in the bay area) let alone live there with kids. The level of filth, crime and sadly mentally ill on the streets is not something I'd want to subject any child to.
> Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities
What makes the walkability "real"? I'm curious what has led to the HN meme that one can only walk places in Manhattan or comparably dense cities?
We live way out in nearly-rural suburbs. This is as walkable as it gets. The kid can walk to big parks nearby, libraries and movie theathers, shopping, etc. I walk to my office and just about everything is a short walk or bike ride away.
> Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars.
I'm in that demographic and feel exactly the opposite. These suburbs are for kids. It's a picture perfect place of safe independence for growing up. They can walk to each other's houses and play in the parks etc independently.
> Not sure how recently you may have been to San Francisco
I am raising 2 small kids in San Francisco. It seems fine.
Smashed car windows are frustrating and disappointing (there are clearly some organized groups fencing laptops or whatever, and the police should get off their butts and do some more serious investigatory work). But the city does not feel at all physically unsafe, relative to other places in the USA. Cars are the biggest danger by far, just like everywhere else in the USA.
We have some mentally ill homeless neighbors. When (rarely) someone is shouting obscenities into thin air we cross the street and stay out of their way. The rest are harmless, though still sad to see. I don't chat with them as much as I used to, because they aren't the best at wearing masks or respecting social distancing during the pandemic, and we haven't been walking around the neighborhood nearly as much.
> picture perfect place
Yeah, this is the problem. People care about things being picture perfect way more than they care about where their kids will enjoy living, or where they will grow into the most kind, resilient, and capable adults.
Yuppies often have a pathological fear of dirt and poverty, and have conditioned themselves to feel discomfort or even nausea when thinking about it. If your kid steps on dog poop sometime, or has to sit near a smelly person on the bus, or has a weird conversation with a homeless guy at the park, it isn't going to do them any serious or permanent damage.
This might come off as naive, but I feel like that would that be pretty easy to solve, as far as urban design problems go, right? Kids mostly don't need specialized facilities -- just more of the same kind of buildings. If you took a college and turned one of its buildings into an elementary school and one of its quads into a playground, you're most of the way to being "child-friendly." Or so I would think? Don't have kids, in case that wasn't obvious.
Hopefully this doesn't sound rude -- I just mean to say that a college campus's child-unfriendliness isn't a reason not to copy the model, since it's easily fixed.
Would cities be more desirable for a lot of people if they were only made up of college-educated (or college-viable) people? I think for a lot of suburban dwellers, their main concern is quality of the public schools. Enable them and their kids to be surrounded by other highly educated people who place high value on schooling, and they'll come back in droves.
Being able to discriminate against residents is the reason colleges can have the high density walkable neighborhoods they do.
Much of the value proposition in moving to spaced out neighborhoods requiring cars is that you filter out people who can’t afford cars or driving longer distances.
I see this levelled a lot, especially by urban dwellers but I've never met this person that moved to the suburbs so they wouldn't have to see a pedestrian.
Most people I'm aware of move out because they have some innate claustrophobia, like a little more nature, want to have a garden, want to have a workshop.
Is there some low key xenophobia prevailing in the burbs? For sure. Are a lot of them bothered seeing homeless people because they're no longer used to it? For sure. Do a lot of them vote against policy that might alleviate poverty because it's easier to judge the empoverished from a distance? For sure. But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move.
Everyone needs an Oasis. Some people find it in the stacks at the library, some in their own bedroom and some on 1/4 acres of manicured lawn and bushes.
> But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move.
It’s not xenophobia, or any other ideological hate for others. It’s simply the result of optimizing for your own kids’ outcome. The country dismantled mental health care facilities and the law doesn’t allow for involuntary committals. The country’s drug policies and lack of economic opportunities created addicts who may not be able to be helped. Overall, we don’t have the stomach for the necessary wealth transfer needed to fix broken families (providing poor parents with sufficient wages and time off and healthcare so they still have time to be at home with their kids).
As an individual, there isn’t much you can do to in the timeframe of raising your kids to solve these issues. So you do the next best thing (if you can afford it). You run away from the problem as much as you can. Which also helps exacerbate the issues. And it’s all part and parcel of the increasingly wide wealth/income/opportunity gaps.
Do private schools not exist in your area? In my city in Australia there is a public city school which is perfectly fine but contains people of all backgrounds and then there are a few private schools if you want your kids to only associate with people of a similar background.
Or use a different example, inclusive zoning in Japan is generally very mixed, with good outcomes for walking/cycling/transit. The only exclusive zoning areas is for industrial.
I wonder if it's possible to make a fully-walkable city modelled after a college campus. Let's play with some numbers. I'll make some conservative estimates of space requirements.
Indoor residential space: 400 square feet per occupant + 200 sf fudge factor
Indoor retail space: 25 sf per-capita + 25 sf margin
Indoor office/misc job space: 200 sf per office worker + 50 sf margin
Indoor schooling/daycare: 150 sf per student + 50 sf margin
Indoor supporting infrastructure: 20 sf per capita
> Hospital requirement is only around 1 sf, so I'm just adding an arbitrary margin to account for rarely-visited indoor locations (e.g. churches, community centers), storage for city vehicles (fire department), waste management, etc.
Rough population proportions by age group in U.S.:
Let's take all of the worst-case numbers, that every working-age person requires office space. The total space requirement for a population of 1000 individuals is:
Or, 875.5 square feet of indoor space per person. This is largely dominated by residential and office space, which are highly favorable for high density construction.
Now, let's consider what a "walkable distance" is for an average person. I'm very happy to walk anywhere within a 10-minute radius (1/2 mile), but can probably live with 20-30 minutes if there is good bike infrastructure. For now let's just discuss the walking case. A 1/2 mile radius is 0.78 square miles, so a perfectly walkable space would contain all of the services I need within 0.78 square miles, or 21.7 million square feet.
How many people can we fit? Filling all of this space with single-story structures would allow us to fit 25,000 people. There are some obvious adjustments we need to make. First, we can realistically build 3 or 4-story structures for residential and office space. Next, we have to adjust for necessary road infrastructure (emergency services, delivery, waste management, etc). New York City dedicates around 50% of its land to roads and open spaces. Using suburban road densities, we can spend 10% of our land on simple 2-way streets. The remaining 90% can be spent on buildings and outdoor space. Let's say we dedicate 30% of the total land to buildings (6.5 million sf), which leaves 60% outdoor space (13 million sf). This is a fairly comfortable estimate based on looking at a map of my college campus. How many people can we fit? Let's assume some densities:
Residential: 4-story buildings
Retail: 1-story (could possibly go 2, but makes delivery logistics harder)
Office: 4-story
School: 2-story
Infra: 1-story
The footprint requirements per thousand people are:
This means our 60% open, fully-walkable space can support a bit over 23,000 people, for a population density of 29k per square mile. For reference, this is slightly higher than New York City.
So, what happens when we bring parking space back into the mix? A 150-car parking lot requires an acre of space, or about 300 sf of parking lot per car. Imagine your city needs two parking spaces per car (one for home, one for work). Even if each family of 4 owns just one car (this seems like quite an underestimate), the parking requirement for our city of 23,000 people is 11,500 spaces. This amounts to 3.45 million square feet of pavement alone, just for parking! In other words, 0.123 square miles of our 0.47 sq.mi. walkable area is now parking lot. Now, how much extra road do we need to facilitate moving all of these vehicles? I'd estimate we need to dedicate at least as much extra space for driving as we do for parking, so now 0.25 square miles (53%) of our outdoor space is now dedicated to personal vehicles. Sure, Amdahl's law of parking infrastructure allows us to reclaim half of this space back if we decide to build multi-story parking structures or hide them underground, but this is a huge waste of resources considering that our city doesn't even need passenger transport of any kind!
In summary: Using some very conservative estimates and medium density, a walkable circular area of 1/2 mile radius (0.78 square miles) can quite comfortably fit 23,000 people with adequate space for residence, office, retail, schools, and remaining city infra. If we dedicate 10% of the land for minimum-necessary roads (emergency services + transportation of goods and waste), we still have 60% of the land remaining for green open space and walking. If we want to add cars, we easily lose over half of this walkable space to parking and additional road. In all of these estimates, I tried to favor cars as much as possible.
I did a similar calculation for the maximum population of a city where everything is reachable within 20 mins of train & walking. The result was ~500,000 people.
I would like to make a more detailed design and simulate it. The simulation could even include things like sunlight entering living spaces and workspaces and sunlight on walking paths during commutes, over the year. A new city could maintain such simulations as it builds and develops, and end up with much higher quality of life for all residents.
1. Rarely required services might have a small footprint, but that's because they service a very large area. You're not going to have hospitals after every mile. You're going to have one for a small city and a few for larger cities. This means that getting to the hospital for most residents is not going to be walkable.
2. Many businesses of a similar kind seem to cluster together. Eg lots of (competing) shops will be in the same location instead of being spread out. This means that you'll have disproportionate amounts of some businesses at the expense of other services in your area.
3. Jobs and specialization. If you've specialized in a field that is only hired in some specific places, then you're going to be doing a longer commute unless you can move close to your job. If it's a high paying job then chances are that this will be a very expensive area - some people will accept a longer trip to work to save the money.
I think this kind of analysis is great. It would certainly help if cities were more walkable, but I don't think that we can go without driving infrastructure.
Your points 1 & 3 are handled by subways & streetcars.
Cities in Asia show that point 2 doesn't have to be a problem. Shopping clusters around the train station. Restaurants and groceries are more dispersed. Everything is reachable by foot in <10 mins.
A large college campus is 50-75k people. This is evidence that our towns can be human scale. A city is 10x to 100x that. I don’t think you can scale up the time that students spend walking by 10-100x and still be okay. You’re going to need some kind of wheeled transportation, and the layout might have to accommodate it in a way that a college campus with purely walkable trips doesn’t.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. I live in Philadelphia, a fairly large city that's still extremely walkable in certain parts.
Before I moved recently, I was paying around $900/month for a studio apartment in the city center. From there, it was a short walk to any number of nearby restaurants (including a corner store on my block), a <5 minute walk to the nearby commuter rail station, a <10 minute walk to the nearby city subway station, a <15 minute walk to a major regional hospital, and about a 30 minute walk to my office (this was generally the longest trip I'd have to make with any frequency, and honestly a walking commute was pretty nice). I did keep my car around largely because I have friends and family outside the city, but if it weren't for that it would largely not be necessary. Within the city, the subway system gets you pretty far outside of the immediate walkable area near my old apartment; my only complaint is that there are parts of the city that aren't as well-connected by public transit.
Philadelphia is an extremely human-centric city, which makes sense as it was established well before cars were invented.
The difference I think is that students frequently have to move between buildings while people outside of education typically visit 2 - 3 buildings (including home) in a day. With remote work you could just make sure you are with in close walking distance of the supermarket / retail as well as a public transport stop that gets you to all the places you visit occasionally (the beach, etc)
Density doesn't mean everyone is forced to live in a studio apartment either. I live in Tokyo in a 3-story house paying less in rent than I ever did in Atlanta, Seattle, or Ann Arbor. The biggest difference is the expansive train systems, allowing for clusters of shops and restaurants that are accessible without a car. And not a parking lot in sight (good riddance)!