In fact, only one of my grade school friends lived anywhere close to me that I was aware of. I lived in a single-family home inside or adjacent to a typical suburban neighborhood my entire life, and I do not recall ever once just spontaneously just doing things with groups of friends. Even for most people that live close to major shopping centers, there are usually fences or other barriers that negate the most direct path, requiring one to walk a rather circuitous route. Kroger is nearly an hour walk from where I live, and getting there is potentially hazardous due to having to cross a busy, dangerous stroad (there used to a grocery store closer than that, but they were still over half an hour away on foot, and getting there and back required crossing one of the main stroads). Everywhere I've lived, it would take at minimum 20-30 minutes just to get to the closest convenience store on foot. Even getting groceries essentially requires a car.
You can't do much of anything around here without driving because everything is so spread out and low-density. According to Walk Score, at least, Augusta is one of the most car-dependent cities over 200k in population in America, and all of its suburbs are unwalkable as well. Look beyond the first few results of your general search on before complaining about housing costs and understand that the various underlying benefits from just reduced usage of your car, let alone outright not owning one, can have massive financial impact. I could easily get that rent increase down to ~10-15% too if I chose to live outside of downtown, have more roommates, or go for a more no-frills housing situation. In exchange, I get greater access to arts and humanities, a 150% pay increase that would have been completely unattainable in Fargo for me, and a greater sense of belonging. Nowadays, I live in downtown Minneapolis with one roommate and pay ~30% more in housing in comparison. I formerly lived in the Fargo ND area, essentially one giant suburb with the way it's designed. The city has been a godsend as an Asian immigrant. I suspect the folks complaining about massively higher rent prices in cities (current rent crisis not withstanding, but that's the fault of corporate landlords rather than cities themselves) probably aren't even looking at or considering living in an older brownstone building either, but you know, gotta have that new-new or whatever. I should've known.Ĭities on the whole generally have higher rent prices, sure, but typical 1BR pricing isn't really all that far off from the 'burbs or smaller cities. Of course there are weird nerds defending desolate car-dependent suburbs. Walkable cities that are integrated with residential areas are just %100 better in every way. It's hard to explain without someone experiencing it. Same for some of the walkable city areas in Quebec, it's just a way better experience. After seeing how walkable streets in Japan are and how easy it is to get anywhere and doing anything makes me really sad how much we ruined our cities. I feel like that probably has more of an impact than just how the city is laid out. There are less stores in the area now than when I was a kid and the area wasn't even done being built back then. All the stores in the plazas are empty, so theres no reason to travel that far. Who would want to ever go there? A large empty field of dead grass with 2 broken swings. They tore out all the trees, bushes, benches - it looks like nothing now. Going back to my parents house now and seeing the park, they gutted all the cool stuff in the playground so all that's left is swings. If I didn't watch this video, and I had kids, I probably would have sent my kids out to play in a park with no idea that I'd get in any sort of trouble. Every park had tons of kids playing all day. Cars aren't that frequent in the suburbs outside of the time when people come home from work so we used the road for what ever the hell we wanted. Kids were out everywhere in the streets playing hockey, riding bikes, racing RC cars. The odd thing to me is that I grew up close to London Ontario and the suburbs mostly looked like what he shows of the Netherlands with regards to kids doing stuff.
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