I don’t understand it. Good public transit, a townhouse of an appropriate size, and most of what I need in walking distance would be amazing. Yeah I may still want a car, but I’d have to seriously ask myself if it’s worth the cost
I feel the opposite as an American I never get asked these questions though. so I always wonder who they are asking.
the type of people who actually answer their phones and don’t hang up when the surveyor starts asking questions.
Unsurprisingly, a large amount of people prefer the lifestyle they already have than one that is unknown to them.
“best we can do is a small house in a car-based community”
“best we can do is a
small house1 bedroom apartment shared with 6 other people in a car-based community”Don’t forget to tip your landlord
I never go downtown unless I have to, the traffic is terrible.
The people who live downtown want to make it easier to walk places? Fucking commies!
I don’t want to live in a small house I want to live in a high density building. Preferably with about 100 units so its still small enough to be a community. It would need a garage though as my wife cannot handle not having a car. I can get her to not use it often but she can’t fanthom not having it as an option (just to be clear this is really far for her and im pretty sure if I die she will be driving every day).
Americans fought against carbrain in the 1920’s, now they’re all infected.
That’s because geographic isolation is the situation they grew up in. They haven’t experienced the alternative.
In many places in the us, apartments are built in such a way where they come with all the negatives, but also without many of the upsides that apartments should have.
I know several people who live in apartments, but there still isn’t anywhere to walk to anyways!
Sure you might be able to, but if it requires crossing 80m of asphalt just to cross a street no one is going to do it.
Yes, there are garden apartments near shopping plazas but in order to access a grocery store, one needs to play Frogger across a 5 lane highway or 6 lane intersection. A lot of people get hit whether on bikes or on foot. You don’t want to trust your life to some Zoomer or Boomer looking at their cell phone while careening down the road in their SUV or Pick-up.
Most Americans drive to their corner stores, I was so disappointed in my roommates once when I went to the (<5 minute walk) store and they decided to go too and passed me in the car halfway there.
Yeah that’s kind of ridiculous.
But if we’re being honest, most Americans don’t even have access to a corner store.
My newest grocery store is a 2 mile bike ride away. It’s not awful, but it’s also not that great. And my friends in apartments I’ve visited are even worse. I am at least lucky that the main road I have has a multi-use path that makes it tolerable.
In the NE, it is very cold, icy and dangerous to try to walk half a mile to a corner store during Winter.
That’s why I slither like a lizard in the blizzard.
And we should have infrastructure that would mitigate problems like that.
Even when walkable, it’s pulling teeth to get people out of carbrain.
Even when we have a corner store it may be useless. I was excited when my neighborhood got one and I tried to develop a habit of using it. But this “inconvenience “ store was useless. They’re really only interested in selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. Good riddance
Friend of mine got divorced and had to move out of her family home. She ended up in a nice apartment in a huge building, but with giant strides on all sides. It’s an island of inaccessibility
Rigged question: would you rather live in a big house or an apartment? Obviously people will choose a big house duuuh
I would rather live in a big house/apartement in walkable area than a big house/apartment in a car dependant area. But thats not the question they asked.
Exactly if I can have the same house with actually more garden space as I dont need a car I’d choose that every time.
Even then it’s not a very useful question as car =/= car. Having a house with a prius that you use once in a blue moon to visit your grandma in the country side is very different from driving a pickup truck every day.
Daily driving a non-passenger work vehicle family passenger vehicle.
Climatetown represent!
Another alternative is a row house. It’s bigger than an apartment, you actually own it with no HOA bullshit, you park on the street (though I have to pay the vast sum of about $30 a year for the privilege). And you can live in or near the city center, where you can find every kind of pub, restaurant or shop and where you can get trains or buses anytime.
Commieblock
55% is just past half, and the US is pretty sprawling. I wouldn’t call my house big, or small either, but being able to walk or bus to work is something I have not compromised on since I was 20, it’s more important than a big house. Which apparently puts me in a large minority.
I feel bad for the 45% of suburbanites who would prefer to be closer to everything, we have those house farms in the exurbs here. The houses are big, but not far apart. I know several people who moved down here, bought one of those houses because they looked nice, them realized how trapped they were, but right now the price of houses in my previously very affordable neighborhood in the city has risen to eye-watering levels, and that is true for most of the areas in the city.
I mean if you live within walking/public transport distance of stuff, you don’t need a car thus you don’t need a parking (or as americans call it — the driveway) or the garage in the house, thus you don’t need as big as of a house on the ground floor which can be used by a store, restaurant or cafe instead and people can live above it. It’s a win-win for residents, store owners below, environment, urban planning and communities.
Living behind the shop or above it was my favorite location, for certain, but I think I’m in a smaller minority on that. Not in a high rise, just the shops had living space behind and above them. That was a long time ago though, since then I’ve lived in detached houses and that’s what we have now. I don’t need a car but do have one still - I was lucky, my work moved from one business district to another and landed a mile from my house. They moved to make it more accessible to more employees but coincidentally made it very close to me. The old location, if my car was in the shop, could only be reached by bus by first riding downtown then getting a ticket on a bus run by the next city over, their express bus to our city had a stop at the old office, but in one direction you had to walk across, not kidding, an eight lane state highway. At a light so there was a crosswalk but still.
I think that it is because many Americans have no experience with the other as a lifestyle.
Yeah, this feels more like “people haven’t experienced being in a walkable community with good transit”. My buddy is having to move back to the States after a year in Germany, and he’s so upset that he and his wife are gonna have to get a car again and not just walk/bike everywhere.
Or are so unfit that walking places sounds like an insurmountable challenge.
It’s almost certainly not insurmountable unless you have something like COPD. I’m 70, went for almost two years after having covid where I could barely walk around the block, and now I can walk or cycle for hours over any terrain. It’s hilly here, so that’s saying something. I also lost almost 50 pounds that I’d gained during my period of enforced inactivity. There’s no secret. Just start slow and keep doing it, and lay off the junk food.
They want to live a socially miserable life.
I live in one of my state’s few walkable neighborhoods adjacent to a downtown core, when I try to explain to others in the area what it’s like, well, they’ve never had any reason to use sidewalks besides the yearly trick-or-treat around the cul-de-sac. Vaguely know their neighbors as they wave in passing.
For me the best part was getting a job downtown, by a park, so I can exist almost feeling like a much larger city proper. Main library, tons of restaurants, shops. Historic homes. Neighbors who care for each other and feel like extended family. This is what ‘urban’ can and should feel like - community.
It’s even the basic things, like sidewalks. If you never use a sidewalk, why waste money on them? I have neighbors who never clear their snow because “no one uses the sidewalks) (despite all the footprints from people who do). There are too many places without sidewalks and no one cares.
Then of course, the effing cars. In the last few years of more frequent walking places
- I’ve almost gotten hit by someone cutting a corner across the sidewalk
- I’ve almost gotten hit many times bu cars ignoring the crossing signal
- I’ve almost gotten hit many times by cars pulling up fast to a red light and into the crosswalk
- I’ve almost gotten hit many times by cars taking “right on red” without stopping (legally require) or looking around the corner
- almost every time I walk somewhere is inconvenienced by someone parking on the sidewalk
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I believe walking is such an alien concept that they’re just not aware of issues like these
plenty of American vloggers on YT saying exactly that. Most people are bereft of imagination or prescience.
I’ve had it both ways, and there’s nothing that compares to having your own house and land with privacy away from noisy neighbors.
When I lived in a city there were more things to do, and I could bike to work, but the crowding feels like a social prison. Also I saw some people get shot, and thieves stole things from my porch repeatedly.
Perhaps. However, we have to acknowledge that there’s a price to be paid for this - particularly an environmental price - and it’s not the householder who pays that price. If where we lived didn’t have consequences for other people then it wouldn’t be an issue. But when these decisions lock in urban sprawl, car dependency and excess emissions, they become everybody’s business
I grew up in exactly that kind of environment; really, the land (and the wildlife that comes with it) is the bit I miss the most. I’d take a very modest house on a decent plot of land in the middle of the woods to living in a city.
I want to live in a modest house within walking distance of downtown and unspoiled wilderness. How do I make this happen?
You just have to move to a town with a one street down town. Small town life is a mixed bag
NYC, next to central park?
Any small town in New England
Such as? I feel like New England is like 90% sprawling suburbs like the rest of the country.
Also by downtown I do mean a real downtown with actual amenities.
@LibertyLizard @btsax Look at the MBTA commuter rail map (or NJ Transit, SEPTA around Philadelphia, or Metra around Chicago). A lot of the regional rail stops are in or near historic downtowns that provide some downtown amenities plus rail access to the bigger city. Houses near those downtowns are generally more expensive than sprawlier suburbs but cheaper than the central city.
A lot of bigger cities do have car-dependent sprawl around an unaffordable city center like Portland, Hartford, Burlington etc but a lot of the smaller towns are much more walkable and community-oriented, where you can probably afford a quarter acre lot within walking distance of a downtown. Brattleboro is a good example but getting pricey, Bennington maybe, Hanover NH, Montpelier, Farmington ME etc.
You’re not going to find Boston-level amenities in i.e. Brattleboro but you’ll get a minimum of a coffee shop or two, a brewery, a few good restaurants, shops, etc. plus small-town community and an affordable home
Some remote towns in Canada give land away for free or for a very low price.
Look for an older town, built out before cars.
I have a lot of that where I live
- walkable downtown, centered on a train station - settled since 1600s, bedroom community of a major city
- first zone for single family homes so I do have a small yard/driveway/basement yet still walkable to center of town
- I got one of the “new” houses, built in 1946 out of very solid materials, with a usable basement, yard, and driveway. For example, my own EV charging
- just a few blocks away is a sizable reservation of undeveloped land and a six mile loop of ridge trail - we occasionally get coyotes that presumably live there
More needs to happen than just infrastructure changes. It’s a a giant educational issue. Individualism is pushed as being the most important thing in the west. This leads to the majority being wildly inconsiderate. Individualism is central to consumerism/capitalism. It always comes back to capitalism.
Agreed. I live in a walkable city and would love to live somewhere with no neighbors who think blasting “She thinks my tractor’s sexy” on repeat eight hours a day is perfectly fine.
Might I suggest buying an audio spotlight, pointing it at the offending house, and then blasting Baby Shark at them on repeat?
That’s a war crime
I’ve had it both ways, and I was never happier than when I was living in Brooklyn, with access to excellent public transit and lots of walking-distance community support.
And, believe it, or not, my cost of living was half the price to living in Orlando, with a car. Also, I made more when living in Brooklyn. also, Orlando sucks.
Orlando sucks
Have been to Orlando once. Can confirm. It sucks. The residents suck. The commercialism sucks. Plus there are tiny lizards everywhere, and you don’t want to step on them, but you’re like "c’mon little guys, I just want to walk on the sidewalk. I don’t want to crush you…but you DO crush them if you walk on the sidewalk. It’s inevitable. And then you feel bad.
I have lived in Tampa for my whole life without ever stepping on a lizard. Yes they are all over, but they aren’t running underfoot. I don’t like Orlando, so haven’t spent much time there but the lizards can’t be that different.
I once (before cell phones put a video recorder in our pockets) saw an epic battle between a lizard and a palmetto bug. They were wrestling, same size as each other, thankfully the lizard eventually won. It was like a miniature version of a Godzilla fight.
Must’ve been a small palmetto bug
Anoles. They’re everywhere. But don’t feel bad, they often drop their tails to evade predators, and also they don’t live long enough to really understand what’s going on with these giants walking on their basking rocks lol.
Have you met people?
I’ll do almost anything to keep my distance.
I have 3 kids. In the city I can afford a 2 bedroom in the suburbs I can get whatever I need. It’s not that I prefer it… It’s not really an option
I’d say most people move out of the city into a big house because the land value and house is much more affordable than close to the city. However the lower price is then offset by the extra travel time to and from work, costs for car, petrol and maintenance.
In the end you don’t really save any money, you just spend it on either car and time or land value.
Time is the most valuable commodity you will ever own.
Anyone that chooses a life with loads of transport are sort changing themselves big time.
Time is exactly why a lot of people in America choose to drive. Public transit practically doesn’t exist, or would take two hours to go about a 30 minute drive bleeding away all your time. I just checked, and there’s not even a bus that runs close to when I go in. It costs $4 and over two hours. I’d have to arrive more than six hours early to take the bus. And that’s with the bus stop, literally in the parking lot of the business.
America needs to decuple their public transportation spending for about a decade just for us to catch up with the developed world.
