Reply to Why don’t Americans embrace urban living?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][twitter]https://twitter.com/mikeyoung44/status/1631140182656253952?s=46&t=RFOp9btBA36axwryPaOF0Q[/twitter][/quote]

I would never live in a dangerous neighborhood if I lived in the city so this is irrelevant.[/quote]

It's very relevant because the average American can only afford housing in the dangerous areas of major cities.  Sure, Cleveland Park is beautiful and walkable and relatively safe, but you need to be able to afford a house that is $2.5M+ and pay $50k a year/kid for private school because the public schools stink.  The average American cannot do that, which is a very big reason that they don't live in urban areas.[/quote]
Or (shocker!) you could live in an apartment like we do. Sure, we're still technically rich (HHI 250k) but we can't buy a home in CP, but we love it here so we rent. It's right near so much nature, very safe, it's a tradeoff well worth it to us. Plus, my kids have some best friends in our building and it's a lovely community.

The thing is that everybody should really evaluate whether you really need 2000sq ft per person in your home. The cost of insisting on that arbitrary need for space is just so high: economically, socially, environmentally. Sure, some of you will need it, but it's like this "given" in our culture and it's just so incredibly untrue. [/quote]

In our 4,000 sf suburban house, we have only 800 sf per person.

Please tell me, lady who has no home equity, how this is costing us economically, socially, and environmentally?[/quote]
If you don't understand the basic facts of how suburban sprawl is detrimental to the environment, PP sure won't be able to educate you.[/quote]

Not PP but there the suburbs are not detrimental at all to the enviornment.  Better for people to live outside a city.[/quote]

depends on the density and access to transit, but most sunbelt suburbs (with their attendant sprawl) are horrible for the environment.[/quote]

Cities are horrible for the environment too. [/quote]

Prove it.[/quote]

Pollution from all of the cars/buses/high rises. The buildings take so much electricity and gas to run. They’re wasteful. All of the poor homeless people on the street littering everywhere. All of the cabs and Ubers polluting the earth. All of the light pollution. The strain on the infrastructure that causes harm to the environment.

[/quote]

You're describing the effects of people, not the effects of how those people are distributed in space. Cities have fewer residential buildings per person, and more of them share walls, which reduces heating and cooling energy losses. Cars in cities are disproportionately people who are commuting from suburbs; if those folks were a city environment, the distances they travel would be shorter and transit usage would be higher, reducing emissions. Buses are much better than cars on a per capita basis because they have more people in them and can often run on lower emissions technology. More people in a dense area means more undeveloped space and therefore less light pollution. More people in a dense areas also means fewer resources spent and less pollution from maintaining infrastructure (the roads and pipes and wires are all shorter because people are closer together). I could go on.

Anyway, there are actual statistics on this for at least one important dimension of environmental impact (carbon emissions), and the numbers clearly show that cities are substantially more environmentally friendly:

https://coolclimate.org/maps

I'm sympathetic to the "let everyone have their preferences" crowd, but we have to acknowledge the ground truth that suburban living is extremely environmentally costly. If we're going to have a planet with over 8 billion people on it, it's not so clear that we can pull it off while also spreading ourselves out per the 20th century suburban paradigm.[/quote]

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