Folks that support American urbanism have been set back decades.
Smaller apartments in dense, walkable neighborhoods have been pretty miserable places to live for over a year now.
The bargain was that you don’t need a house with a yard when you can have an apartment surrounded by parks, restaurants, and bars; that you don’t need a car when you have transit; that you don’t need a home office…
Then all of that was taken away in a heartbeat with little regard to its effectiveness. Suddenly owning a house and a car were critically important again. It’s going to take a long time for people to come back.
Nothing about the pandemic made my apartment a miserable place to live. It was alaways a miserable place to live.
* There is no bike parking available, so 2 bikes occupy a large portion of my living space
* The sidewalks outside my apartment are small and in a state of disrepair
* Intersections are cyclist and pedestrian hostile making it hard to go anywhere without it being a stressful experience
* The landlord refuses to fix my A/C when it's 118 degrees farenheit outside, meaning it is often 92F inside the apartment (And no, citing the municipal code that says this illegal does nothing and nobody has the energy to hire a lawyer right now)
* The bus stop has been in disrepair to the point where it was recently just removed altogether meaning I have to walk a mile to get to the next one.
* The next nearest bus stop has no shade or place to sit
* I can't mount my TV to the wall or make any changes to make the small space more comfortable (like hanging shelves or mounting hooks)
I want nothing more than effective urban living, but I have yet to see it. So from my perspective, I'm not sure what was really "lost" during the pandemic that wasn't already broken.
Also, since I see some replies mentioning it, I would rather my parents ad grandparents be alive than have any of the above be fixed. So I'd be careful to judge too harshly and gain some perspective about "strict" measures to curb the spread of the pandemic.
You can withhold rent and put it in an escrow account and get a hotel room until your landlord provides a habitable environment regarding the broken AC, at least that was the case for me in California. They can’t evict you over this and will lose in court, of course look up your state laws as they vary by state.
I don't know how people move into appartments where they aren't allowed to drill holes in the wall. This would make an appartement unusable for me.
Unanchored furniture is extremely risky and kills infants every year.
Yeah, there's a risk that you might drill into a pipe. In the last 20 years that happened to me once, and it was annoying, since it cost 200€ to have the pipe fixed, but it's not really a big deal.
> I can't mount my TV to the wall or make any changes to make the small space more comfortable (like hanging shelves or mounting hooks)
For what it’s worth, I’ve done this every place I lived and never had a problem. I always make sure to patch the holes and paint the entire wall when I move out though.
Meh, I disagree, except for that it would be nice to have better access to a car right now. I could buy one if I had an income, but I'd only do so reluctantly.
Living in a rainforest-like climate in Vancouver, I couldn't be happier. Ya, I could use a little more space than my studio. Ya, it sucked so bad when the pandemic hit, but much much less so than in suburban areas. I still only walk 2 mins to a bar or where I buy groceries. Transit is the same. Mountains aren't far etc.. To say urbanites have been set back decades is ridiculous.
That said, idk about living right downtown, but I've always hated it anyway because it's a boring landscape with boring people.
Should it come back? I feel like this succinctly demonstrated the innate flaws in urbanism, rather than being a novel, isolated failure mode for an otherwise robust ideal of how people should live.
I disagree. A strong counterpoint is that rural and suburban infrastructure is impossible to financially support based on the limited tax base you get from them compared to dense neighborhoods. Much fewer people on the same amount of roads and sewer systems means spending way more per capita to maintain and build them. Way more than the tax base can provide, even. On top of that, neighborhoods that are spread out require more people to drive cars, which not only increases the maintenance burden, but also requires loads of parking lots at grocery stores. And none of that grocery store parking lot is going to generate the tax income required to pay for the infrastructure needed to travel there.
Beyond that, rural and suburban services are very heavily subsidized by federal and state grants, most of which comes from urban areas.
I would say that urban living in North America has two fatal flaws:
1. Housing prices (and other cost of living)
2. Incorrect city design based on cars.
High prices, especially for housing, increase the number of homeless and desperate people. This increases crime by a lot.
Car-centric design makes moving about a dense area very tedious for everyone, including car drivers. Urban design ought to be more centered on people throughout, which means pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit are treated with more priority than cars. Every city in North America is designed the complete opposite. Not only that, but cars are very noisy and dirty compared to other modes, making the urban area even worse.
At least the city design portion can have a huge benefit. A counterexample to your point is likely most cities in the Netherlands, like Amsterdam, which reportedly have very happy citizens and very people-centric design.
Plus, 83% of Americans choose (or need) to live in an urban area despite the flaws.
For more info on the financial aspect, this video and the others in the series are great: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
> Much fewer people on the same amount of roads and sewer systems means spending way more per capita to maintain and build them. Way more than the tax base can provide, even.
This is simply false. Maintaining roads takes typically less than 10% of the budget of the municipality. Additionally, road construction and maintenance is significantly more time consuming and expensive in dense urban areas.
> On top of that, neighborhoods that are spread out require more people to drive cars, which not only increases the maintenance burden, but also requires loads of parking lots at grocery stores. And none of that grocery store parking lot is going to generate the tax income required to pay for the infrastructure needed to travel there.
Huh? The grocery store’s parking is part of grocery store, which generates tax income.
> Plus, 83% of Americans choose (or need) to live in an urban area despite the flaws.
Yes, ~80% of Americans live in "urban" areas, but the majority of those living in "urban" are living in "suburban" areas if you actually look closely. For most classifications its simply either urban or rural, not urban/suburban/rural.
If it definitely failed then Japan definitely failed to demonstrate it, with their vastly lower number of virus numbers per capita (and deaths) and high urban density.
I always struggle with Japan comparisons; it seems like
the variables we often want to directly compare are not easily isolated from deep, fundamental differences in culture, institutions, politics, and even geography.
In my opinion, the marginal reduction in transmission of infectious disease during a pandemic is not worth the cost moving away from urbanism. Humans are meant to congregate together, and city living and everything that comes with it are the most efficient ways to do so.
Humans have historically always congregated together, but never at the scale of urbanism — if historical precedent is the argument here, we’ve almost always operated at the much lower densities of rural environments.
City urbanism might be the most resource-efficient in many ways, but animal well-being isn’t measured solely in terms of how efficiently we can feed and house you.
Humans are not humans in cities. “Who survives in NYC without amphetamines”, I remember from a movie when I was a kid. Now I understand the sentence: With no connection to the earth, city dwellers invent an idea of ecology and relation to nature that is in total disconnect with people in farming.
For my goddaughter, killing ants is the top of all evils. Ecology should be able protecting cute things. For me, terraforming kilometers of arable land to build her colonies on Earth, that was the real crime. Cities bring the illusion that humans are legitimate in unfathomable numbers. Cities hide away nature’s constraints.
I think you misunderstood the quote as a kid. People (or at least those without ADD, narcolepsy, etc) are taking amphetamines to compete in a fast-paced city. And besides from my limited personal experience city people may misuse amphetamines at therapeutic doses, but it seems like it’s rural people who abuse them at toxic doses.
Essentially, flaws that are unique to and induced by scale and consolidation.
Outside of the current pandemic, those problems range from the rent-seeking consolidation of housing ownership into very few hands, to the elimination of forms of self-reliance that create healthy community — instead shifting those responsibilities to government and large institutions.
Scale also requires more top-down centralized control and regulation in order to function at all.
The issues you stated could be suburban or even rural issues, not just urban issues. In other words I think you might be conflating the difference between an agrarian economy with a modern economy with specialization, not urban vs rural.
I saw a different explanation. Cities are inheriently high density and make things used enmasse as much as possible and inevitably leads to more contact among others. This is unfortunately also a good way for pandemics to travel. The isolation highlighted how little they owned spacewise.
Now that is a spectrum and we are all dependent on others but they are at the high end. The low end is "compound in the middle of the wilderness which is dependent indirectly for there to be wilderness unused for them to DYI everything".
The issue will hopefully wind up rare but there is no great certainty in these matters.
I don't know if I fully subscribe to this view, but a friend of mine pointed out that the age of our leadership (President, Senate, Congress, Governors...) are all very old. They are the ones most at risk, and that may have biased their response towards harsh restrictions for people at low risk.
As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly hurt 20-somethings? Would our old leaders stop everything to prevent transmission of that disease? Or would young people be told to suck it up? Or would they have asked 20-somethings to just stay home while everyone else went about their business? I'm not sure...
Do you remember the initial response to AIDS? There's your answer.
(AIDS was originally attributed to only gays and sexually promiscuous people. Best case, leadership simply ignored it. Worst case, innocent victims were attacked [read the Wikipedia article for "Ryan Wayne White"].)
Fauci ran our response to AIDS too. He held back treatments for years expecting a vaccine. The Dallas Buyers Club is a good dramatization of what people were going through.
There's also some clips of him warning people not to have casual contact with gays (he says people with AIDS).
I would argue that our current response is what we did have done if the young were more at risk. What Sweden did was the more correct response to the current pandemic.
But I wouldn't necessarily blame the older leaders. My company sent everyone home before the nation shut down, and it seemed mostly because people were worried about their kids
"As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly hurt 20-somethings?"
This happened [1]. They told young people to go ** themselves. People had school, people went to eat, people carried on with jobs, NO government checks sent out. Deaths: 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.
"Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old"
I guess you're talking more generally, but this specific problem of car shortages is due to chip shortages. It doesn't have anything to do with any public policy measures. Factories may shut down briefly overseas, but the enormous demand surge for other electronics is the biggest culprit.
There may have been blunders with the policies, but if we're talking about history judging things harshly... I think it's far more likely that the massive disinformation campaigns, irrational and willful non-compliance with reasonable safety measures, and cowardice when faced with the need for vaccination that will get the brunt of it.
So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people who disagree with these public policies are spreading misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?
Because I don’t think that such a thing promotes healthy, much needed dialog. The idea that any criticism or skepticism of the core tenants of the last year and a half of public policy is misinformed ramblings of crazy people…
You are committing a logical fallacy. Claiming that there have been misinformation campaigns around Covid is not the same as claiming that all disagreement is misinformation. Your outrage is therefore completely off the mark.
I find it fairly easy to find specific bad information campaigns promoted by smart people. For example, those two doctors in Bakersfield California created misleading arguments using bad math [0].
Meanwhile the media is full of anecdotes about kids dying and people saying “I regret not taking covid seriously” and stuff like that. Then you have that Dr. Ding guy on Twitter spreading fear and panic. Is that not dangerous misinformation?
I don’t think that everyone who disagrees with the public policies are spreading misinformation. I also don’t think that the people making the restrictive policies are acting in bad faith, or without reasonable advisement, or are just stupid or something like that.
>So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people who disagree with these public policies are spreading misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?
Whereas you're asserting that it's impossible for smart people to spread disinformation?
~400K Americans die of preventable medical errors every year. No hysteria. No pandemic. Not even news coverage.
Our population grew by 0.58% during the pandemic.
The media does its very best to blow everything out of proportion for ratings. COVID is no exception. What a win for big pharma. 640,000,000 doses of a drug they can't be sued for. It's absolutely fantastic for them.
Now look at who they bribe.
It's been an incredibly good couple of years for our oligarchy.
I see 5 cherry picked examples without considerations of many factors. All of this ignoring the clear trend we see in current deaths with Delta.
Just two basic things the charts don't consider:
1. If people followed mask mandates in states (e.g. Alabama vs Florida)
2. Population density and disease spread models (e.g. comparing Montana and Idaho felt like a reach, California vs Nevada doesn't consider spread in major cities vs how many major cities there are in each)
We absolutely should study this later, but some of these restrictions were little to no cost. Let's not lump them all together. Wearing a mask indoors vs if your kid can go to school or not are two very different value equations that may merit different answers of "if a restriction is worth it"
I spent the pandemic in a tiny apartment. Did laundry in the tub for a while (no w/d). Finding space to hang sheets to dry was a fun challenge. Quickly developed an appreciation for easy to wash and hard-to-stink-up items like singlets. Not going to lie, the laundry part sucked. But that is not inherent to urbanism. Most apartments can be updated to have a w/d. Many can be updated to have outdoor space. The parks are still there. From my perspective, the bargain you describe still exists and it was never critically important to own a house or car. Still in the city and not leaving any time soon. To each their own!
I don't know I think it depends on the particulars of the area. Things didn't shut down everywhere, and having a car wasn't so necessary when everyone was working from home. In addition being in a high density area preserved some camaraderie and togetherness in a period of universal isolation, and being able to get out and walk around in the immediate area was a great way to fight cabin fever.
In other words, by my estimation the urban ideal continued to be advantageous for different reasons during the pandemic, though I can certainly picture other urban centers that would have been a much worse experience, in particular those with stricter mandates and poor weather (which is a truly isolating scenario).
I don't think urbanism has been affected that much.
In my neck of the woods (SE Florida) urbanism didn't lose a beat. Rental apartments in my neighborhood are leasing at above asking. There were a few months where the city felt abandoned, property values were down, and leases were offering signing bonuses.
It's done a 180, or 360 now, city property values are climbing. New construction is way up, even with the high cost of labor and material, and shops and bars are working with the new normal. My city has taken advantage of decreased traffic to institute popular pedestrian projects that were unpopular to commuters.
The opposite happened in some Southern California areas. Some popular restaurant streets were closed to car traffic, and the restaurants added outdoor eating spaces. This happened in Santa Barbara and Ventura. It looks like the areas are at least considering keeping that change even post covid.
Anyone living near those areas had an improved walkable neighborhood.
Also I don’t think anyone living near a park lost use of those parks.
> It’s going to take a long time for people to come back.
The numbers don't really bear this out. Rents are as high as ever and inventory is largely back to pre-covid in the major cities where the life you're describing exists.
It depends on what people take away from this year. There seems to be little chance of any distancing restrictions returning in the US for covid so the market is being driven by how much people believe this has set a precedent which will be regularly repeated
On the plus side, single-family zoning laws are being dismantled on the west coast. This will lead to people demanding more transit since there won't be any parking. Of course, the only transit available will be busses because most cities/burbs are so poorly thought out that there is no room for light rail. But i'd love to see more bus routes and frequent schedules where I live. The cost is crazy: $5 one way to go from my house to the city center, once per hour, and no times per hour at night. That's gotta change.
My husband and I bought a house precisely for this reason. We had lived in downtown apartments for the past 15 years but couldn't take being so cooped up anymore. I LOVE the extra space and my own yard. I miss being in a high-rise, but I love my house even more.
You talk about US and I, as an Indian, realized during this pandemic that you must have a car no matter what. In last 12 years I never felt the need to buy a car so strongly as I did in last year.
Smaller apartments in dense, walkable neighborhoods have been pretty miserable places to live for over a year now.
The bargain was that you don’t need a house with a yard when you can have an apartment surrounded by parks, restaurants, and bars; that you don’t need a car when you have transit; that you don’t need a home office…
Then all of that was taken away in a heartbeat with little regard to its effectiveness. Suddenly owning a house and a car were critically important again. It’s going to take a long time for people to come back.