With very few exceptions, there’s nothing healthy or normal about living in chaotic, densely populated urban areas with high crime and endless noise, air and light pollution. In addition, there’s nothing natural about needing to work a bullshit job just to survive.

People ought to really start asking what is being afforded exactly when it comes to making city life “affordable”.

One of the reasons is that people insist on living and working in some of the wealthiest and most expensive cities in the world.

I live a cheap town and my commute to work in the 2nd biggest city in my country is just 25 minutes.

I am not missing anything. I just deeply disagree.

City life is enjoyable in and of itself. I don’t live there because I have to for my work. I live there because I find it inherently better than living somewhere else.

If I was living in a normal city and not the capital of my country, it would not even be more expensive than living in the countryside. It would probably actually be cheaper. Gas is expensive here and our cities are built like proper cities.

I think you are projecting your value on the situation and conclude that cities are doomed. Personally I think we are just going to witness a shift away from cities where life is expensive towards cheaper cities.

> Very few do.

So the people living in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are not living well? That's news. Tell me how else I'm not living.

Outside of the very core of these cities, you can live, and live well while benefitting off of all the things large urban centers provide (culturally, financially, etc).

I cannot understand why cities in the US are built the way they are.

I live in a relatively big city in Germany in a somewhat dense neighborhood (most buildings have 3-5 stories). I have two grocery stores within five minutes of walking, a great Italian restaurant around the corner. If I want to go to the city center it is a ten minute train ride, going to the lake is a 12 minute ride. I can quickly get around the city center by using the subway and all of this for a fraction of the cost of owning a car.

I grew up in a more rural area and personally, living in a denser cities feels more "luxurious" than living in a town where I can't get anywhere if I don't drive. The cities are still far from perfect, but this is mostly because they desperately try to accomodate the car obsessed public (but not as desperately as American cities)

Much of this is caused by the high cost of housing. Everyone needs to be paid enough to live here or enough to be worth commuting long distances.

> availability of labor and land are extremely constrained

That's not really true. There's not a lot of empty land, but there's huge swaths of underutilized land. Only zoning law prevents it from becoming more useful. Instead we get crumbling single family homes a few miles from a growing number of skyscrapers.

The leading cause for people not wanting to live somewhere is almost certainly the ability to find work (relatively) nearby. Large amounts of crime are only really a problem in sufficiently large cities (obviously with exception) and particularly poor ones, both of which stem from a lack of sustainable income:CoL ratio.

You have the causality in the wrong order. They are the most expensive places on earth because they improve your quality of life, not the other way around. The price is derived from demand which is derived from a desire to have access to many goods, services, and experiences not available in many other places.

I can speak personally to two other cities I've lived in where housing costs are quite high (though lower than SF and Manhattan): DC and Santa Monica / West LA.

My fiancée and I lived in DC for 5 years in a wonderful expat bubble. While I'm am American, the vast majority of our friends were from all around the world and worked at international development organizations. The extra money we paid for housing was worth all the interesting experiences.

Los Angeles is no different. It's easy to find interesting experiences and food through its diverse populations. There is a fundamental aspect to the nature of cities, viz. that there is a good to density itself. It enables humans to get value out of the shear existence of interacting with other humans in interesting ways. You need enough demand for an experience to support the existence of many experiences (e.g. You can't have a live punk music scene in a town of 100 people. Or even if somehow you do bc the entire town loves punk, it will be at the expense of those people being into other interests. Having enough people with enough wealth and distributed across enough interests/cultures/foods/music tastes, etc facilitates access to way more possible experiences. That, at least, I why I love large American cities.

One wonders, then, what cities are for, exactly?

Living in a well planned urban area in the united states is too expensive for most people.

I do think that there is a chicken and egg problem here, and it's part of why we think it's so important to keep poor people in their houses as the place gentrifies; A poor person growing up in a rich city has massively more economic mobility than they'd have growing up in a small town.

Of course, you are right that it's hard to be poor in a big city; but if you can snag a rent controlled room, or your aunt's couch or whatever, it can be a good leg up.

No. Cities are far from dying, at least in the vast majority of the countries I've been to. There are bike lanes, lower crime rates, better parks and waterfront areas. They feel alive inasmuch as the suburbs feel dead.

There is one, major problem with cities right now and that is property prices have climbed beyond the levels that are affordable for the working class. The reason that has happened is that interest rates have been kept low for decades and the state usually backstops either banks, or mortgages up to a certain amount, or both; so the risk of loss is lower. To solve this issue we need higher property taxes, especially on land value and street frontage of non-heritage buildings and to make up the difference, lower income taxes or a basic income. I also think we need specialized taxes on foreign national owned or occupied homes to prevent every city from becoming a digital nomad hub, while pushing out the locals. I like being a digital nomad, but I hate what we're collectively doing to middle income countries.

That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades. Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.

Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.

I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.

(I'm honestly not sure if this is a troll comment or not. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt though.)

Alternatively one could say any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to prosper and innovate.

Also, and more importantly, the majority of dense, walkable cities do not have high costs of living - e.g. Berlin, Barcelona, Istanbul, or even much of Chicago. Just because the most expensive major global cities are dense and walkable that does not mean that all dense and walkable cities are expensive.

If you look at the most expensive zip codes in the US [1] you'll see that eight out of ten are in low-density suburban or semi-rural areas. Does that mean that low-density suburban areas are all super expensive?

[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/betsyschiffman/2015/11/10/full-...

It seems that everyday on HN there are articles showing examples of how cities are becoming increasingly unaffordable - this one makes me feel really sad.

Some cities. (And, more specifically, some parts of some cities.) I'm sure it's not hard to find inexpensive housing in many areas of Detroit, to give one example.

It really boils down to demand and land value, which is a particular problem in cities that can't just spread out further.

This has been true for a while, but somehow didn't prevent the city from hitting rock-bottom. How is this relevant now?

People live in these places because that's where the jobs are. You can move to a 'cheap' city, but you'll find that it's cheap because the pay is equally cheap.

The bigger problem is that the landowning class is viciously extracting far more wealth from the populace than is warranted by the service they provide, and using that wealth to lobby to prevent competition that would reduce the rents they extract.