I think that it is because many Americans have no experience with the other as a lifestyle.
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.
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.
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.
This is nuts. I lived in Orlando for half a year, and have visited dozens of times (grew up in Tampa Bay) and never once stepped on a lizard there. Genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about. Lizards are all over but they’re not suicidal
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.
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?
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
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.
Yeah that’s probably the closest that exists honestly.
But really what I want does not exist.
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?
Oh sure let me just ask my parents for a small loan of a million dollars so I can afford rent.
Also Central Park is not exactly unspoiled wilderness. It is nice but not quite what I want.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
plenty of American vloggers on YT saying exactly that. Most people are bereft of imagination or prescience.
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
They want to live a socially miserable life.
“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.
Many places in the us, apartments are built in such a way where the 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 cigars 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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
They didnt ask me or anyone I know
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.
Why?
Why don’t I want to be bothered by or hear all my neighbors? Is this an honest question? Do you like hearing everyone around you? Do you hate peace and quiet?
Because I prefer the peace and quiet. I also do not want to engage in small talk or feel obligated to acknowledge people out of courteousy and maintaining peace with them when I just want to go about my day.
I don’t want to hear people fucking, or fighting, or their kids running around the apartment or any other bullshit that comes with apartment life. Apartments suck ass and I never want to live in one again.
Okay, maybe I don’t know the quality of the apartments you live in because when I want quiet time for me, I just stayed in my flat. A simple brick wall is enough to shield from almost anything. Or maybe the society you live in is very different from the society I live in. I actually enjoy seeing and talking to the people that live around me.
And well, the thread is about people preferring single family houses in the US. Those houses on their oversized properties are often completely excluded from any form of community. I feel like this type of lifestyle makes us more and more sociophobic.
@JigglySackles @Beeen132 The leaf blowers of suburbia are a hell of a lot louder and more annoying than the vast majority of noises people in an apartment can make.
I’ve lived in both. I definitely don’t agree with your perspective. I barely hear any leaf blowers etc year round.
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’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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Maybe some people don’t want to live very restaurant. I feel like that would be one of the first choices rejected.
I am happy with my small house, small yard, walkable town.
- yard was big enough for toddlers to play, and parks are nearby for when kids got older
- yard is big enough for a nice deck and grill
- just enough separation that I’m Not disturbing anyone when my dog barks or I use power tools
- BASEMENT!!! the most important room of the house
- and yes, off street parking where I have my own charger is nice
