The current city doesn't work anyway. A lot of our development patterns were born of seeds planted in the 1950s during an era when the nuclear family -- with a male breadwinner, female homemaker and 2.5 kids -- was the assumed standard basic "economic unit" and one male breadwinner provided adequate money, healthcare benefits, etc for multiple other people.
Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the male breadwinner.
The female homemaker de facto worked at home. Most women's work -- cooking, cleaning, raising kids -- is done at home and is generally not assumed to be anything like paid work that needs to be regulated as a profession. Yet it is essential work, critical to the health, welfare and productivity of the world.
With people living longer, marrying later, having fewer children, living many years after the kids grow up and move out, etc. this model breaks down. As the world has generally moved more towards two-earner couples, a house in the suburbs has gradually turned into a nightmare we don't know how to escape because, at least in the US, it's our default assumption for a good home looks like and most of our financing and tax benefits etc are aimed at that type of home, so it is a large share of our good housing stock. Attempts to find alternatives, such the Tiny House movement, have largely not worked all that well.
We need to re-envision our social fabric. This baked-in, unstated assumption that most people are part of a nuclear family with multiple children and one partner doesn't need a full-time paid job is very much out of date. It's mostly no longer true and, unsurprisingly, the built environment we created to accommodate that lifestyle works rather poorly for all too many people today.
So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.
When mom and dad both work and the neighborhood has a dearth of children for your only child to play with, the social fabric that lived when I was a child in a neighborhood full of kids cease to exist and the road are congested and people are both time stressed and financially stressed.
This is the crux of a lot of the problems with the world today. We built a world for the parents of the Baby Boomers, in essence, and we haven't updated it. Demographics have changed, yet we continue to try to force-fit this shoe and wonder why it pinches so very badly, to the point of being crippling for many people.
> Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the male breadwinner.
This is US-centric though. The notion of downtown vs. suburbia is the complete opposite in Europe for example, and in many other parts of the world as well. I remember as a kid learning English and learning about the US that it was amazing to me that "downtown" was considered low status and "suburbs" were affluent. Visiting, I was almost amazed to see downtown Minneapolis almost completely deserted on a Friday evening. It made me think of "28 Days Later". In Europe you'll mostly see downtown being the historical, beautiful and expensive part of town while some suburbs are post-war, concrete blocks of public housing.
> So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.
It seems to me that the odd thing, or perhaps not so odd when you consider the era they were built in mostly, is that these suburbs completely lack any city planning in terms of public transporation. As you say, it's a requirement to have a car to even get in and out of the place. The implications of this are many, and often quite weird seen with my eyes -- for example, teenagers are essentially "contained" until they get their own car, or know someone who does. You can't go out drinking without a car because there's no commercial area in the immediate vicinity. But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs? You wouldn't have to change the suburbs so much as the transport network around them, and perhaps add some local commercial areas to make them slightly more self sustaining.
That movement existed elsewhere too, but never caught on as much as it did in the US. Stockholm has a bit of sprawling suburbia which was mostly built in the 1950s. The difference is that in the 60s that went out of fashion in urban planning while the US kept building those suburbs.
As noted elsewhere, I'm pretty short of sleep, so I no doubt could have said some things better.
Yes, some of what I'm describing is very US-centric. But not all of it.
When I was growing up, most of the world lived and worked on farms. Within my lifetime -- in fact, within the lifetime of my children -- that changed and we now have more people living in cities worldwide than on farms.
The world has changed, but we still cleave to certain mental models that no longer serve us well. That's the super short version.
But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs?
Mostly, no. The suburbs actually built in the 1950s aren't so bad. A larger problem is the policies that era fostered in the US and the direction things have gone since then.
Average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and held about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is more than 2400 square feet and holds about 2.5 people.
There have been a lot of other changes as well in what is typical for a new home, but those details right there are enough to let you know that our homes have grown larger on average while our families have grown smaller. Meanwhile, we have a growing homeless problem (which people on the internet routinely want to claim is unrelated to housing supply issues and the high cost of rent, but the data doesn't support that conclusion).
Our family size has shrunk. Our homes need to also shrink and we need to return to patterns of development compatible with fostering walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented design. Adding public transit to existing suburbs won't really achieve that.
The general assumption in the US is that young people should rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get a bunch of roommates to fill the extra rooms and split the rent. Then we make horror movies, like Single White Female, about basically what a nightmare this is. The internet is filled with horror stories of the roommate from hell and questions about "How on earth can I survive this or get out of this???"
We have eliminated about a million SROs. People object to SROs a "slum" housing. They are literally more comfortable with having people out in the street than with building housing that isn't upper middle class as our baseline expectation without providing jobs and incomes to support that as our baseline expectation.
While eliminating small homes that people could potentially live in as a single adult or childless couple, our millionaires are actively planning to eliminate jobs and create permanent unemployment. After eliminating jobs that paid on average $20k to $50k annually, our rich people here would like to institute UBI paying between $10k and $18k annually with an expectation that we will have 80 percent permanent unemployment.
Given that we have eliminated most housing across the US that costs less than $500/month to rent, there are a lot of places where $10k won't even pay your rent for the year, much less feed you. Without resolving our housing issues, there is no hope that some ridiculous scheme like UBI will do anything but shaft most Americans.
I mostly can't get people to really listen to me. They are too busy listening to multimillionaires and failing to see that those people are actively and intentionally planning to create a permanent underclass that will have no hope of accessing wealth ever again.
I was homeless for nearly six years while active on Hacker News. Simply being allowed to run my damn mouth in the same space as all kinds of millionaire businessmen absolutely didn't fix my life and lift me out of poverty and so forth. So I'm quite convinced that the entire point of wanting to create UBI is so that asshole rich people can wash their hands of poor people.
It's quite horrifying and I don't know how to stop it.
On the upside, the pandemic seems to have fostered some of the changes the world has been talking about for years and not accomplishing, such as reducing our carbon footprint and reducing pollution. So maybe we will find solutions anyway, in spite of bulling our way intentionally and on purpose towards a dystopian vision of intentionally shafting most Americans and telling them to fuck the hell off and forget about ever having any kind of a life.
This comment is a little more on the ranty side than I really like. I'm just really short of sleep and tired of trying to be polite to people who literally don't care if their callous BS results in my death. So it's probably time for me just stop talking and attempt to go get some sleep.
I spend a lot of time on Hacker News where, for a time at least, articles regularly appeared here about the desire of Sam Altman and Elon Musk to institute a UBI. A quick search would readily turn them up.
Sam Altman has grown quieter about it, but his desire to make it real persists. He put $5 million of his own money into a UBI experiment when he was president of YC and, more recently, he backed some presidential candidate who was proposing UBI as part of his political platform. I think the candidate's name was Andrew Yang.
My proposals:
We fix the housing supply issues we have and institute universal health coverage in the US. Those two things would go a long ways towards improving things for the lower classes.
I don't necessarily think it's impossible to have a UBI alongside "other nice things." I just know that what I've read so far doesn't at all bode well for UBI being a positive.
Should I start hearing different things, I would be amenable to changing my mind. Given some of what happened during the pandemic, I'm cautiously hopeful that someday things will be different.
Don't know why you are downvoted, your ideas are very good and insightful.
Thanks for bringing up the idea of the separation of public and private spheres, it was something I couldn't articulate for a long time as to why somehow the suburbs always felt better and healthier for me. I still don't understand my peers obsession with living in downtowns (you can always drive downtown if you want to go there).
I do find issue with your need to re-envision our social fabric. This stream of thought is very old, beginning with Plato, the gnostics of early Christianity, the enlightenment and going through some pretty unsavory moments of the past two centuries. Underlying the tension this kind of ideas always have is the nature vs nurture debate; and certain disatisfaction/disapproval of human nature. The way society evolves is much more a consequence of how human nature is realized and expressed in modernity. I would say as I grow older that I've come to realize that accepting our humanity rather than trying to change it (speaking of certain artificious ways in which we try to "correct" our nature), would save the world a lot of pain.
When you mention the example of both parents working, though it is as much a consequence of both parents in many families working (leading to higher income, which means families where only one works get squeezed), as it is of women seeking to work and be more independent than they previously were. Even then, many women I've met, still have this natural longing for living in this nuclear family.
I do see that further increases in population density will only aggravate this situation. As the economy becomes increasingly centralized in cities, people need to work there to get a good income ---> however rents and prices just keep rising benefiting the people who already have significant assets in the city. If families were willing to forgo some degree of comfort/convenience/modernity, maybe a return to rural living could restore some of this fabric. However such a reversal in urbanification, seems unlikely given the current materialistic obsession practically everyone lives in. For a long time now, possibly earlier than the industrial revolution, the main focus of individuals is not who they are, but what do they have. To this last bit in some perspective, what would people think of Socrates if his death happened today, someone willing to die for his convictions? To a very big percent of people (and I myself recognize the bias to think this way. Something of how I was raised in this world?) it would seem meaningless, why couldn't he just compromise and keep on living? What was important for him was in some sense his soul/beliefs, for us it seems to have a comfortable life. C'est la vie moderne
I do find issue with your need to re-envision our social fabric.
My feeling is that there is a failure to communicate somewhere here. At the risk of just digging my grave deeper, if only because I'm horrendously short of sleep, let me try a second time to explain what I mean.
Our demographics have simply changed a great deal. It's not unlike saying "We can't weave what you want us to weave. We don't have the right material for it. That's why attempts to recreate the fabric you love have big holes in it."
When I was growing up, there were lots of kids out and about to play with in my neighborhood because most families had more than one child. You mostly don't see that anymore. The suburbs are ghost towns, with no children playing in the streets. Now, one child is quite common and parents have no choice but to join clubs or similar to intentionally create social connections for their child when that would have happened organically a few decades ago.
I was a homemaker for many years. I'm not against the nuclear family. It's just reality that our demographics have diversified, yet our architecture hasn't kept up and it's creating problems.
What I'm saying is the single family detached house was designed for a certain type of lifestyle and it's a lifestyle that relatively few people can arrange anymore. It's a cog in a machine and it no longer works for current demographic realities and we aren't changing it out for something that does work.
I'm sorry that I don't know how to say that more clearly. These are not really points I see made very often, so I'm not aware of well-developed language and standard protocols or mental models for conveying what I'm trying to say.
Got a bit busy, but came upon an essay today and reminded me of this thread. It is super interesting for me and I think you will enjoy it as it talks a lot about the context of the creation of suburbs and how society changed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastpsychiatrist/comments/93jztv...
Suburbs grew out of the idea of a separation of the public and private spheres. Please note the assumption there is that it separates them for the male breadwinner.
The female homemaker de facto worked at home. Most women's work -- cooking, cleaning, raising kids -- is done at home and is generally not assumed to be anything like paid work that needs to be regulated as a profession. Yet it is essential work, critical to the health, welfare and productivity of the world.
With people living longer, marrying later, having fewer children, living many years after the kids grow up and move out, etc. this model breaks down. As the world has generally moved more towards two-earner couples, a house in the suburbs has gradually turned into a nightmare we don't know how to escape because, at least in the US, it's our default assumption for a good home looks like and most of our financing and tax benefits etc are aimed at that type of home, so it is a large share of our good housing stock. Attempts to find alternatives, such the Tiny House movement, have largely not worked all that well.
We need to re-envision our social fabric. This baked-in, unstated assumption that most people are part of a nuclear family with multiple children and one partner doesn't need a full-time paid job is very much out of date. It's mostly no longer true and, unsurprisingly, the built environment we created to accommodate that lifestyle works rather poorly for all too many people today.
So that's where we need to start. And it is very much bound up with car ownership and car use because the single family detached house in the suburbs assumes you have a car and assumes a family of five only needs one car.
When mom and dad both work and the neighborhood has a dearth of children for your only child to play with, the social fabric that lived when I was a child in a neighborhood full of kids cease to exist and the road are congested and people are both time stressed and financially stressed.
This is the crux of a lot of the problems with the world today. We built a world for the parents of the Baby Boomers, in essence, and we haven't updated it. Demographics have changed, yet we continue to try to force-fit this shoe and wonder why it pinches so very badly, to the point of being crippling for many people.