“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
Unsurprisingly, a large amount of people prefer the lifestyle they already have than one that is unknown to them.
Ok that’s misleading a bit. The poll asked if you’d rather live in a larger house that’s further from other people but stuff like restaurants are miles away, or smaller and closer together but stuff like restaurants are within walking distance. I’m paraphrasing but only slightly here.
You’re extrapolating the car based and walking based part, but these people could also want more public transportation and bike routes. Maybe these people already live in cramped apartment buildings and just dream of having a big house. There’s other factors than just “me dum American me want car”
Seriously, I just don’t want to be bothered by people or live in an apartment where I get to hear my neighbors or constantly encounter them.
Yeah sorry, neighbors are usually assholes who stick their noses in other peoples business. I’ll live as far from other people as I can.
If I could choose my friends as neighbors it’d be different.
Yeah it’s unclear how much fantasy was allowed with these questions. Like if commute and money and pollution were no object I’d prefer to live on 1000 acres in the mountains with a cabin-mansion and hobby farm.
But realistically for cost and commute I just want a big yard for gardening, and peace and quiet.
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.
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.
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.
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
In the NE, it is very cold, icy and dangerous to try to walk half a mile to a corner store during Winter.
And we should have infrastructure that would mitigate problems like that.
Even when walkable, it’s pulling teeth to get people out of carbrain.
That’s why I slither like a lizard in the blizzard.
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.
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
Hyperindividualism and apparent institutionalized agoraphobia.
My agoraphobia comes from a lifetime of being bullied by people so I don’t like people. I like my small house and small suburban backyard that I grow vegetables and have chickens in.
Dunno about your story, but I have worse online experiences having to put up with others too full of themselves compared with the simple neighbors I have.
with a little AFFLUENZA mixed into it.
I wouldn’t mind living an an apartment building nearly so much if only the building came with shared versions of the amenities a single family home might have: A yard for kids and dogs to run around in, a garden area with planters, a garage so people can work on their vehicles… If a 12 or 24 unit building just had single shared versions of these amenities it would make the apartment lifestyle a lot less restrictive to people who feel pressure to buy a house but don’t want to burn their life savings. Two reasons this doesn’t happen are regressive zoning codes and landlords treating shelter as an investment to squeeze value.
Yeah I could never willingly live in an apartment for many reasons, but a few of them being:
no common outdoor area for pets, so if your dog needs to pee you have to take them for a walk around the block to pee on some tiny patch of grass beside the street.
As you mentioned no garage/driveway to work on a vehicle or even have any other space intensive hobby/activity like woodworking.
Privacy, I just hate having neighbours and noises at all times of the day.
Gardening for more than a couple pots of tomatoes and herbs on a balcony.
And many more
Privacy, I just hate having neighbours and noises at all times of the day.
This was a big thing for me. I understand that my apartment is surrounded by other apartments but I don’t like being constantly reminded of it either by the noise they make or trying to be super quiet in mine so they aren’t bothered.
The problem with many apartments in the US is shoddy construction, not density.
I live in a Victorian row house, at the end of a row, so I have one neighbor I share a wall with. It’s two courses of brick with an air gap in the middle. The house is well-constructed, so we literally never hear each other. However, back when I was renting, I lived in places in the same city where the sound isolation was so poor that you could tell if the toilet paper the neighbors were using was soft or scratchy.
My wife and I both work remotely most of the time. She’s on a call upstairs right now. I don’t hear her.
They are built so cheaply now, you and your neighbors hear too much of each other’s lives. Gone are the old insulated plaster and lathe walls; Now it is all chalk filled paper board (drywall). Even the floors are a thin layer of plywood nailed over the joists with a thin pad and carpet laying over it.
Yeah, the sleep deprivation I experienced last time we lived in an apartment makes me loathe to ever consider it an option again. Now I live near an elementary school, and have kids screaming all day at PE. I don’t mind it a bit! People are fine, but when you can hear your neighbor coughing at 3am and it wakes you every night it drives you nuts.
Here they just loosened restrictions, so wood framed buildings can be built to six stories …. Now you’ll be able to hear all 500 of your neighbors stomping around, but at least it will be cheaper to build, right?
Note: a lot of the initial resistance was fire safety in large buildings. Sure enough the first six story wood framed apartment block in my town burned to the ground. I know that’s just one example and I don’t know enough to have an opinion on that, but makes you think
Yeah I’m originally from New York where everything is cement and steel by code but now I live in Portland where tall timber buildings are the norm and it definitely does give me pause in regard to fire safety. I guess a caveat is that the structural timber in those new buildings is a dense composite that is supposed to burn less intensely or resist fire altogether but yeah we’ll see…
They didnt ask me or anyone I know
that’s because they still aren’t bearing the TRUE costs of suburban sprawl. it’s still “cheaper” to live in suburban hell than in the city.
if the math started to make more sense, many more would choose walkability
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
Probably due to most of them already living in car based societies that are far apart. Living like that makes me people hate their neighbors, and they want no one to encroach on their kingdoms
Most Americans are selfish fucks.
Signed,
An American.
It’s well-known that how you ask the question in a survey can drastically skew the response, and so we have to interpret these results based on the specific questions they asked.
We know from sale prices that people actually covet walkable areas, so much so that the accusation of “rich elitist” gets tossed at proponents of walkable cities. Those places are so much more expensive. So maybe people are thinking of “houses that I can afford” when they answer this survey? Or, they’re answering it from the perspective of already needing a car, so a little extra driving is no big thing.
What would the results be if they asked things like, “Do you prefer neighborhoods where kids can safely play outdoors, or neighborhoods where there is too much traffic danger?” Or, if that’s too biased, “where children can walk to school versus taking a bus or being driven?” Maybe break up the question, “Do you prefer to have stores located near where you live, or do you want them farther away?”
There are lots of different ways to ask, and the different results would be informative.
(Also, this survey relies on self-reported urban/rural distinctions, and those answers are wildly inaccurate, to say the least.)
We know from sale prices that people actually covet walkable areas, so much so that the accusation of “rich elitist” gets tossed at proponents of walkable cities.
We can also tell by the existence of zoning laws. If the demand for larger lots were really that high, the market would develop like that on its own without needing minimum lot size laws to force it.
These could be factors but I do think this is probably accurate overall. Walkable areas are expensive primarily because they’re in such short supply. It doesn’t take a majority to make it expensive, just a slice of the population larger than the people who can actually fit in such places. And since we’ve made dense urban development illegal in like 99% of the country, naturally any amount of people wanting to live in such places is too much.
Ultimately I think this is a problem created by large, majoritarian government. The suburban majority decides urban design and the rest have little to no power to object.
I think tying “big” to “car-based” and “small” to “walkable” is probably skewing the results a bit. I doubt most people would choose “small” regardless of what follows it.
I would choose small, but then I’m weird. A big house just means that you’ve gotta fill it with excess shit, and clean it all the time.
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
If i were too fat to walk, i would too
That’s not the only reasons you might not be able to walk, and we do need to keep non-walkers in mind when designing cities.
I believe there are better solutions that each individual operating a multi-ton machine that requires non-renewable resources. (Even my EV requires tire changes, and AFAIK, we haven’t figured out a cyclic economy for them.)
The EU managed to have about 97% tire recovery, so why should the US not be capable of it as well?
Thank you for the link, TIL. I really thought it was still a bigger problem than that.
My point mostly stands; I’d personally like to get to where I feel independent without a personal vehicle, and I think it would be better for all of us if there were fewer of them in active use.
