>An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars.
Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.
The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.
>> As several recent studies have shown, people in their 20s are turning against cars.
That is such a misleading statistic. Of course young people are moving to the city centers, but what happens when they're in their 30s and with kids? Back to suburbia again because the going rate for 2 bedrooms in NYC is insane... People as a whole aren't ditching suburbia yet.
>My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars
If you think that's true for every Millennial across the country, you're crazy.
>that's a "don't do that then" problem.
Oh, okay. Just don't do that. Gotcha. Pretty simple. Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line.
>but they shouldn't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us.
>> When you get to a certain age and want to settle down and start a family, priorities start to change and you realize how trapped you are, with the European model.
It's hard to overstate how happy I would be if the street outside my apartment wasn't a canyon of speeding vehicular death for a toddler.
I love everything about living in the city with my child except for the sheer number of cars that pass through in the name of "freedom" and for a lack of decent alternatives. It's a short walk or bicycle ride to any number of amenities, and a short commute to work means I can spend more time at home with him.
I didn't like the car traffic before, and I hate it even more now. If there was a car free city on the US Eastern seaboard with an office for my employer, I would move there in a hot second.
Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing.
If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation.
You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay.
>The typical pattern is younger people living in the city and moving to the suburbs as they get older and have kids.
How long has this been the typical pattern? Auto-oriented suburbs are an experiment two generations in the making. Before that development, there was a sharper urban-rural divide. I would not be surprised to see the US largely swing back to that arrangement within the next 60 years.
> If millennials really didn't like the urban lifestyle then wouldn't prices be dropping instead of staying high?
A million times this. I don't want to (and can't afford to) pay for the ultra luxury downtown destination living experience. But urban living is more than luxurious downtown destinations.
I want my day-to-day trips (bringing kids to school, going to the grocery store, going to work) to be safe and accessible without a car. Just starting there implies a lot about the built environment, and your stereotypical suburb just can't offer that.
> I wonder if at some point we'll look back at the 20th century for what it was: a complete disaster of urban planning as sacrifice to the Church of the Car.
Never, that's when. Some people (not you) actually like to have the space to live in. So you need a car. The goal is not the car, the goal is space.
It's not a disaster at all, it's a breath of fresh air, having space.
> I live in NYC.
You do that, and I'll stay far away from that place. I've been there, I would absolutely loath to live there.
> ....gun....car....crime
You have got to be kidding. The crime rate in cities is much higher, if anything cars reduce crime.
> So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.
Not if real estate in cities remains as expensive as it is now. That's one of the main reasons why so many people move out and choose to spend so much time commuting.
Cars are just a means to an end, which is not living in a one-bedroom apartment as a family.
> There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.
There's almost no place in this country -that is affordable- where you can live without a car.
That's the real problem. Sure - there's NY or SF, which for the most part have the infrastructure to support most people's non-car needs. But only the very few can afford to live in either place. I know I couldn't afford it, unless I somehow could land a FAANG job (not likely at my age and education level). I can't even afford to live in the downtown area of the city I currently live "in" (Phoenix) - prices there have skyrocketed, mainly due to certain infrastructure transportation improvements and other things making downtown "the cool place" to live at (and conversely pushing out the artists and such who can't afford to live there any longer). Expensive loft apartments, existing urban housing in the historic parts (pricing gone thru the roof on those). It's crazy. So - out in the "suburbs" I stay (which isn't really the real suburbs any longer, since I'm in an older area that used to be "the edge" but no longer).
> I need space to park a car and roads wide enough to support them because I have a lot of things to haul.
> I'm sure there are folks who live in places like SF with families and ride around in heavy urban traffic with 2 kids on an electric cargo bike, but that's just not for many of us.
Maybe riding a cargo bike with your kids on the back is unpleasant because the suburban lifestyle you are talking about has bled into American urban planning. If American cities were designed around people instead of cars many of the problems with urban life you are talking about would be moot.
I point this out because you thesis seems to be that getting older and having kids is orthogonal to urban life. However, historically, and in many cities outside of north America, this is not the case. If you look at the Netherlands for example, where a deliberate effort to plan cities around people has been ongoing for 50 years, many people don't own cars, their kids bike to school and use public spaces for recreation, and they can pickup furniture from Ikea on their cargo bikes while never touching a road built for cars.
> It’s kind of weird, because if you live in a place where you really don’t Need one, it becomes pretty quickly apparent what a trap that sense of empowerment actually is.
While I agree everyone having a car in a concentrated city is bad; I’ve lived in the Chicago suburbs and public transport is impractical. Cars on the other hand make loads of sense.
I think this occurs rather naturally. Car parking in the city is VERY expensive, so fewer have cars. It’s also dense, so there is less need. Similarly, where it’s cheaper to house a car, it’s more needed.
Personally, I hate living in the city. I am WAY more empowered, have more wealth and have a healthier life outside the city. I can visit any time with my car, but avoid the pollution and squaller
> And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
Many of them are/were also simply anti-social, racist, or just moved where they could plausibly drive to a job, and then kept that job for eternity, depending on what generation and which geography they come from, and for some of those, that actually meant moving to the areas we want to live in too, but can't because they all own it and the local government.
Although some people aren't willing to sacrifice certain luxuries, I don't know that living approximately where you already live and work is one of those. This idea comes up all the time of "just move to some arbitrary cheaper place" but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of those places require cars, and are quite isolated. Much of the time the difference in cost is made up in property taxes anyway, because the place is so low-density it can distribute the cost of the town's maintenance in an effective way.
It turns out that places that people want to live, much of the time, are places where other people live, for all sorts of practical and spiritual reasons, rather than in the woods
>This generation has delayed forming families, but at some point probably will ultimately settle down, get married, have kids
Statistically speaking, wealthy people tend to have fewer children, and have those children later in life. I believe this was true for the previous generation, too.
>the 1 BR in SOMA isn't going to cut it at that point and there will be a flight back to the suburbs.
Yeah, but a 2 BR would work just fine, especially if you only have one kid. And 3 BR apartments are not unheard of. (and the cultural changes required to expect kids to share a bedroom are not impossible.)
I think that the deciding factor here is perceived safety, followed by quality of schools. As cities are gentrifying, people seem to be thinking of them as safer. And a wealthy population (especially a wealthy population that recently moved in, and here in California, is therefore paying full freight property taxes) makes for a bunch of money to throw at those problems.
If cities start being perceived as safer than suburbia? That could push parents out of suburbia and into cities. That's how they got to suburbia in the first place, right? And it's a self-reinforcing cycle; gentrification means more taxes, more resources for law-enforcement, (and conversely, less of those things in the suburbs, if the wealthy folks in the suburbs are moving into the cities.)
> Living in the Suburbs has many benefits. Larger homes, backyards and is safer for kids to run around. All valid reasons to chose them. Lets not try and change people, but work with their preferences.
No one will need to try and change people, they will be forced to change once the budget deficits force their hand. The ones that can may move to a new jurisdiction and start the game over.
I also would not say kids are safer in suburbs. Lots of car traffic, lots of big roads to cross, lots of big cars since why not buy an SUV/pickup.
> a lot of us interpret criticism of car-driving and suburban living as a heavy-handed attack on our way of life rather than as a reasonable argument for having affordable options for both lifestyles
It's just folks punching up. The vast majority of the US is zoned for the car. It's really difficult to find a place that allows a car-free or even a low-car lifestyle. People would react a lot differently if there actually were multiple cities that allowed these lifestyles.
> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.
Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.
So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.
I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.
>This sounds nice until you actually look at most of America. Cities are designed around cars.
Right, and that's the problem. These cities are a product of choices that Americans have made over many decades, and now they're paying the piper.
>If you want people to walk more for their commutes then you need to design cities for walking.
No, Americans need to choose this for themselves, but they don't and they won't. They don't move to places like this, they don't demand it of their elected officials, they instead just buy big SUVs and move into subdivisions. Americans have chosen this lifestyle, and now it's costing them dearly.
> Even in the densest city, I had a car for 10 years.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. I live in the dense downtown of a sprawling urban area and own a car, but it's simply only used for going out on nights and weekends. For most everyday trips I walk or take transit.
OP's point is not that living in a city means you get to or have to give up your car. It's that in many American suburbs, any other mode of getting around for everyday trips - including walking - is simply untenable. Living in a walkable neighborhood with access to good transit gives you the best thing - the option of either public or private transportation. Most of these places, in the US, aren't in the suburbs.
Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.
The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.
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