What a great channel! Finally, found a place to go to hear someone talk about, someone that cares about,all this sweltering heat we’ve been having! Was beginning to think that nobody really gave a hoot about it. Where I live, people just seem to grin and bear it -utilities costs are probably the highest in the country. Not a day passes that I don’t think about leaving this unlivable place. The fascinating thing is that none of these places you’re talking about actually say much about how hot it is there. There also seems to be no sense that the western/southwestern part of the country is basically desert land. When you think of Las Vegas, you really don’t think of high heat, extreme heat; you think of casinos. Something has to be done about this huge swath of land that’s really a massive furnace. I’m glad your channel is taking a good hard look at it. I’ve noticed that the weather services seem to intentionally provide lower temperature readings than the reality of the heat on the ground. They say it’s 100. My thermometers say it’s 115! Seems like they are hiding the truth since if people knew how hot it really was they wouldn’t leave the house and that would hurt businesses.
Tucson resident here. I want to start off by saying that I am an urbanist, I hate sprawl, and recognize the need for density and further climate adaptation. I have lived here car free for years. Transit is lacking but often still usable. Tucson is also known as a bike city, with many miles of separated bike paths around town as well as a network of low stress streets to navigate across town. It has a unique culture, influenced by Indigenous, Mexican, and American cultures coming together, and some truly amazing food. The geographic setting is incredible, with striking mountains in every direction and countless species of unique desert adapted plants and animals. The heat is difficult to manage for a few months out of the year, but I think the amount of perfect weather days in the cooler months makes it worth it. As bad as the heat is, I prefer it to a climate where it can be both sweltering and humid in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. But of course these same issues of poor urban development are a major frustration for me on a daily basis, and I have considered moving because of it. That being said, I feel like this video is somewhat lacking. The fact that you called the Hohokam "primitive" really betrays your lack of research. They created hundreds of miles of irrigation canals to farm and developed an incredibly complex society. The modern O'odham people are generally considered to be the descendants of the Hohokam... and they live in the exact same region, not "escaping" to somewhere else. You also claim that there was no reason for people to move to the desert before air conditioning... that is not true. Irrigated agriculture in deserts is extremely productive because you can grow two crops a year when there is no frost. This is part of why Phoenix was founded as an agricultural settlement. You showed the image of the dry Salt River, but not the massive network of canals that enabled the development of the area. Tucson was also in a fertile valley and a natural stop on established trade routes. It was founded in 1775, and has been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years before. Both cities were founded in locations with access to water year round. Many old buildings in Tucson and Phoenix were constructed out of adobe, a material that provides a natural cooling effect. Even before air conditioning, evaporative cooling systems were common. I actually lived in house with only evaporative cooling for many years, and it can be very effective in the dry climate. Shade is important too, as in a dry heat the temperature in the shade can be almost 15 degrees cooler than the temperature in the sun. I often sit outside on very hot days, enjoying the cool shade. That is not possible in a humid climate. There are many ways to adapt to a desert climate, and really the issue has been that the people who moved to Arizona from across the country brought the poorly adapted generic American sprawl urban form and plopped it here, not the climate itself. Plus, the idea that "settlements in deserts are antithetical to long term prosperity" is frankly laughable. Someone should tell the Egyptians. Unless Cairo is doomed to become a ghost town too. Humans have lived in desert cities as long as agricultural society has existed, and the idea that only cities in temperate climates are "habitable" is, to me, very eurocentric and simply not true. The truth is, every major city in America, even the ones with dense, walkable cores, have a huge percentage of the residents in their urban areas living in suburban sprawl, regardless of climate. Sure, Chicago has a dense core city, but it is still surrounded by a truly massive ring of sprawl with a population that far exceeds that of the central city. Even New York City has Long Island. NIMBYism and pro-sprawl ideology are hardly confined to the Sun Belt. Maybe these desert cities will empty out, doomed by the dominant urban form of the post war boom years. Only time will tell. But I strongly believe that sustainable cities can exist in deserts provided proper adaptation, and that Phoenix and Tucson were natural locations for humans to form major settlements. Las Vegas, well... no argument there!
Many good points. This video was not well researched. I don't know if he could respond effectively given that he doesn't even know about indigenous water irrigation, or that he doesn't even know how people even lived in Arizona before air conditioning... That's just ignorance. It's only one of the greatest examples ever of how to adapt to living in a dry climate. There are histories beyond this "manifest destiny" mindset, and they're not being regarded in the slightest sense.
@@fourth_place Or even Canadian cities and how they compare... I'm in Edmonton and while it's suffering it's nothing like what you're seeing in the USA... Even with -40c and +40c being normal now... We've made some great strides like eliminating parking minimums and upzoning the entire city to include up to 8 units on a single family lot, I believe as well as spending $100M to create a comprehensive cycle network as well as doubling the size of our LRT... All while adding 1.2M residents in 10 years as projected... Half in the current inner city/suburbs and half in new sprawling ones south of town... Over the last 10 years only Orlando grew faster as a metro... Edmonton tied with Austin at 22% population growth to O-Town's 23%
New York City’s 90 degrees is more bearable than Phoenix’s 90 degrees? You’re joking, right? Here in New York City we have this thing called humidity. Combine that with the urban heat island effect, something I’m sure a smart guy like you is very familiar with, the the shade of the buildings provide very little relief. Okay so maybe NYC’s 90 degrees is more bearable than Phoenix’s 110 degrees. But more bearable than Phoenix’s 90 degrees? As a person who has experienced both humid 90 degrees and dry 90 degrees, don’t make me laugh. (Although I’ll understand if the following makes YOU laugh. You know what makes the heat and humidity bearable for me? Bike riding. When you walk or just sit around doing nothing, the humidity keeps your sweat from evaporating; it can’t do its job. But when bike riding, you create a breeze for yourself. The air hitting your perspiration helps it evaporate; you cool down as a result.)
LA is NOT a desert city like Phoenix or Las Vegas. It has a Mediterranean climate. Winters are mild with light rain while summers are dry and warm but NOT HOT. Lumping them as the same is wrong. LA is also way denser and has a large and growing mass transit system.
Depends on which LA you are talking about... Old CLASSIC LA? Correct... But if you're talking GREATER L.A. including the Inland Empire, Antelope Valley? You're definitely talking desert like conditions... With it being one huge sprawl it now covers several biomes... And of course this is where people are moving to right now... Explosive growth in I.E. Palmdale, etc.
The thing about LA that definitely is desert-like is the relatively low amount of rainfall the area receives. It’s an arid or at best a semi arid climate. Have you ever viewed the city from the air during the day while landing at the airports? It would be difficult to miss the two main reasons not to spend any significant amount of time there….smog and extreme car centricity! People know this but they live there anyway!?
To the commenters, LA is a Mediterranean climate and biome, not a desert/arid. Parts of LA's metro do reach into the High Desert though. The past few years had been some of the wettest in LA, though last year was just average. LA's sprawl is crazy, but the heart of the city is actually quite dense with several walkable sections. Some of the country's densest neighborhoods are actually in LA. Even suburbs like Compton have been amping up bike infrastructure. And there are bus and train lines that get completely packed.
My friend moved to the Phoenix metro because it's the center of the US Semiconductor industry. He HAD to move there for his job. Desert cities have added a ton of homes while many older cities have seen less job and housing growth. Why move to a cooler more walkable city when there are no newer homes and little good paying jobs?
Well, this is true! Hard to argue with that! People do need jobs and new affordable housing. At the risk of sounding like an idealist, it would be great if we could base our decision on where to live according to how friendly people are there. In my experience, people make the place! In truth, a lot of the money you would earn in these semi conductor cities is likely thrown away on the expense of car ownership. There’s obviously lots of things to consider.
Well, the job thing can’t be argued with, but why are companies moving there? It’s usually because the cities let them contribute to the sprawl by offering them good prices on land outside of the center of the city. As far as “new” homes, that’s just a personal preference. I prefer historical architecture, but I’m ok with “new” if it’s built the “non-sprawl” way, which it usually isn’t in these sun-belt cities.
@@knowledgeandpleasure Wikipedia says companies move there because of low property costs. You are right about housing and personal preferences. For me safety and peace and quiet rank near the top of the list.
@@knowledgeandpleasure I don't have an issue working away from home but so many jobs I have found that haven't been very close to frequent public transit or otherwise take over 90 minutes to commute to haven't paid that well, a reason that after I have found out about the salaries that such jobs have offered I have simply moved on or later withdrawn my candidacy. Why commute to a job that will pay nowhere close to the cost of commuting to it if public transport is poor or otherwise is unavailable? The London, Ontario🇨🇦-born Amsterdam🇳🇱-based Not Just Bikes TH-cam man and other TH-camrs who have claimed to have given 👎 to urban sprawl all have a point. There's a reason the Australian Outback and Sahara Desert are so sparsely populated: temperatures are so hot, with sources of water hard to find, that there's little point living in those areas.
There is plenty of exisiting housing stock in northern cities many rust belt ciites are FAR below their peak population and new construction is not necessary and contributes to global warming.
8:17 what? Bro the dry heat of the southwest is WAY MORE tolerable than any mega humid Northeast city at the same temperature. That’s crazy. Also today’s high is 93° in Vegas no clue where you are getting 106° figure.
Bro, the dry heat of the SW is a great way to die without knowing heat stroke is getting you since it's so dry you don't realize you are sweating End of the day, total 115⁰+ days are totaled in months not days for large swaths of the SW... Though the same argument can be made for the NE though in winter when the SW and such is very comfortable for the most part... So basically, everyone should move to CA, it's like Goldilocks - not to hot or to cold for most of the state's major population centers...at least here all you will do is die of indebtedness 😆
@@fourth_place yes that’s my bad, I didn’t see the fine print! But you didn’t mention anything about the dry and humid heat difference at the same temperature…
Hey, I say this with no ill will...as a general rule, referring to native tribes and their settlements as "primitive" is fairly disrespectful and not cool to say the least. Not even getting into the fact that these settlements actually had some remarkable works of engineering and careful planning built into their very foundations, that term itself is a very loaded one. It was broadly used to justify westerner's expansion and genocide of the native people through the racist ideas of western (white) superiority over "primitive" people. I don't think you meant anything by it other than to say it was an earlier settlement from an earlier group of people, but that language is and was very harmful both in terms of the people and their descendants that fell directly victim to its consequences and the preservation of these sites and the cultures of the people who lived in them.
Post-record I definitely thought about using a different word but got too deep into the process and left it in. I think my original thinking was like…this tribe existed looooong ago…I mean they died out around the time of Socrates. I mention socrates because, I think it’s a fair comparison to make because even in terms of what the ancient greeks were doing…the Hohokam WERE quite primitive, let alone compared to modern day western civilizations. So, on the one hand I think “primitive” wasn’t exactly the right word to use, but at the same time, it is accurate all things considered. As far as the “genocide” goes…that’s really where you lose me. Native Americans “genocided” way more Native Americans than Europeans ever did throughout time. That side of history isn’t really taught as much though…
@@fourth_place The history you’re claiming isn’t taught much is that way because the vast majority of peoples who would have been able to pass that historical knowledge on perished as part of the over 90% of the native population that died as a direct result of European colonization. In addition to the introduction of an array of devastating diseases, colonial powers and their progeny made concerted efforts to remove, slaughter, and assimilate native peoples as they took their lands destroying their cultures on levels both physical and sociological. The Trail of Tears might be the most infamous example of this, but it was hardly an isolated incident. Roughly 98% of ancestral homeland is gone, and the people who lived there either relocated or dead. To this day native populations make up less than 3% of the US population, and only 5% in Canada. This is in large part due to the deaths, but genocides aren’t just about killings: they’re about cultural erasure. The US and Canadian governments made concerted efforts to forcibly assimilate native populations through the suppression of their religions, languages, and cultural practices. In a very literal sense, native populations were assimilated into white colonial populations through a lot of nonconsensual marriages and untold scores of acts of sexual violence towards native women. In fact, sexual violence towards native women remains a serious issue to this day, which brings us back to how this is an ongoing thing. The language and rhetoric of using words like “primitive” to describe native populations has been an encouraging element in people justifying and dismissing this atrocities in the past, at the time, and through today. And I’ve been focusing on North America a lot here, but Central and South America are also part of this. Actively, right now, there are native communities that have to deal with governments and corporations taking their lands and even just literally massacring them. Among the peoples still native to the Amazon, for instance, they deal with a very real, constant threat from loggers and settlers. In addition to the unrecorded events lost to time, we have instances where, for instance, a community was murdered all the way down to one man. The local government had to create a perimeter around this sole survivor and had to watch him and all of his people’s culture slowly die…and that is exactly what happened. His death occurred in 2022. Two years ago. We don’t know his name, his language, what his people called themselves, or really much else about his people…but we do know of Socrates. I give you a lot of benefit of the doubt that this is just a subject for which you require further reading. Still, doubling down on that term is one thing, but being dismissive of the genocide perpetrated against native peoples whilst insinuating that they did it more to themselves? That is a whole other thing. At any rate, I wouldn’t have written all that if I didn’t think you capable of evolving in this topic. Maybe it won’t all happen today, but hopefully someday.
We need a video on the state zoning enabling act(SZEA) and state city planning enabling act(SCPEA) of 1916 . The main culprits and perpetrators need to be exposed !
Indeed. Those Acts were in response to filthy, run-down, disease-ridden and pestilential slums of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Propaganda of the time showed large Victorian and Edwardian homes on large suburban lots to provide the ideal living conditions and this was before the automobile took over!
You really shouldn't fight with commenters in your videos. Especially a random comment with 5 likes. I'm sure people click for the title of the video, not for online drama.
As someone who has lived in 2 cities in the NE Corridor and both metros of the Pacific Northwest I have a couple of observations along these lines. 1) San Antonio and Austin have a lot more in common with climate and traffic than most reports mention (IMO, ppl just give Austin a pass.) All Texas cities don't fare well in the psychometric chart. 2)I don't speak for AZ, but with the elevations in New Mexico the climate isn't that bad. It would never be a region to support millions, but can offer acceptable temperature ranges with some adaptations. 3) Water scarcity issues in the SW are connected to Industrial and Agri based over usage. The region supported relatively large prehistoric populations. 5) My location here after experience in the urbanist meccas is primarily economic with a scenic silver lining. I felt those places were really exacerbating income divides with housing scarcities. 6) I find the experience of harnessing solar and wind power potentials and usage near the source as a REAL stab at long range human sustainability and a much better use of my short time on the planet. Much of YIMBY culture comes off as self-centered at the amenities of urban life rather than the realities of solving big issues for generations to come.
Great video, I totally agree. You should come to StL when you leave LA! We are the most underrated city in the world, and I hope people start leaving these arid climates soon and help revitalize the Lou to our former urbanist glory! :]
I love phoenix so much but I'm going insane living somewhere where the only natural greenery area within 30 min of my house (that isn't a golf course) is a tiny riparian preserve. I work at a golf course filled with unmaintained wild areas and it makes me sad that we mindlessly paved over so many wonderful and diverse ecosystems filled with quail, coyotes, jackrabbits, vultures, hawks, and other amazing desert inhabitants you will RARELY see in areas of urban sprawl today.
Phoenix native of 23 years here, there are a few reasons that kept me from leaving however as each year keeps getting worse I find it harder to keep making excuses. Never the less some of the reasons include: - affordablilty and a mild fear of leaving. You see Pheonix is relatively affordable in terms of cost of living. I can’t really afford to move to cities like San Francisco or New York because cost of living is too much. Plus as Phoenix gets more populated, housing is going to follow. Being a native I have an advantage of already being here as the city gets improved around me and I am seeing change. They’re extending the light rail and they’ve reintroduced the streetcar in Tempe where I live now. The housing is switching to more multifamily focused style and transit is getting an overhaul with nicer buses. I have no real articles to back that up it’s just what I’m visually seeing. There’s also a new no car neighborhood that was built called Culdesac not far from where I live. It’s giving me hope that the city is trying to be better and I don’t want to leave right as they’re making changes only to come back and realize it’s expensive and hard to get a house now. Other reasons include: - my entire family lives here - the winters here are gorgeous and from December to February the weather is always around 70-75 degrees - there are over 300 days of sunshine which means on the days where it’s not unbearable (usually after a good rainstorm when it’s 10-20 degrees cooler) you’re basically guaranteed to to have a sunny day. - the vast amount of great hiking and sweeping views from mountains like South Mountain, Camelback mountain, Piestawa peak, hole in the wall, the Papago buttes, and others - the Sonoran desert is classified as a wet desert which means that we get monsoon season (a period of massive thunderstorms that lasts from late August to early October) which causes the valley to have flora unlike anywhere else in the world. - the great bird and butterfly migration where thousands of birds and butterflies stop by in phoenix on the way to Mexico for the winter. (So many monarch butterfly its beautiful) - And some of the greatest sunsets in the world. Seriously they’re so great because of the dust in the air that the refraction cause scenes out of a fantasy.
I’m not really sure why Albuquerque was mentioned in this video alongside of Phoenix and Las Vegas. Albuquerque is at a high altitude. As such, the hottest month is July with an average temperature of 94 degrees. June and August are the only other months with average temps in the 90s. This is much milder than both Phoenix and Las Vegas.
One thing you say that isn't quite accurate. . . You say that Phoenix is hitting 100 until November. However, the latest in the year it has ever hit 100 in Phoenix is October 27, 2016. Also, the official temperature in Phoenix is measured at the airport, which has some of the highest temperatures in the valley. Where people actually live is usually 3 to 5 degrees cooler.
LA is a glorified desert. super dry super hot and no rain for months and months. not a drop of rain. sounds like a desert to me. i am also counting the days to leave.
Thank you for the informative video. Clearly, these sunbelt cities are becoming utterly uninhabitable because of excessive heat. The vast urban sprawl has also made many of these places unattractive, uninviting, and depressing. Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in California in the '60s and '70s. I loathed the ubiquitous freeways, wide roads, traffic, and strip developments. All those years ago, I wanted to return to the fatherland. Now retired (after teaching outside of London for 31 years), I live in beautiful, historic Middelburg--a 15 minute city. Although the weather is often wet and windy, I can walk, cycle or take the train easily. I no longer have a car, and I feel utterly liberated and joyful. American city planners should look to the Dutch for some expert advice.
I stayed in Phoenix because all my stuff is here and it would take so much money and effort to move. It's nice about 8 months out of the year. We also have a major airport here with several discount airlines. Cooler weather is only a short plane ride away.
Want a compact city in the heat? Visit Singapore... It has much of what you talk about which makes it one of the most livable places on earth much less in such a hot climate....
Why do people opt for sprawl over density? Price and affordability, and value for space. I mean, just to examine both sides of the argument: the most walkable cities in North America are also the most expensive. I left condo life in the city and opted for suburbia because I can get a 4000 square-foot house with four bedrooms and a den and an office and a home gym and a pool and a sauna and a two- or three-car garage for the same price as a studio apartment in the city with no balcony. And there are no HOA fees to burden me. This is what my growing family needs to thrive and to be successful working from home. I’ve also grown tired of the noise and the inconvenience of sharing a building with other people. I don’t want to wait for an elevator and take multiple trips up and down unloading the groceries when I can pop in and out of my garage straight into the kitchen. I didn’t learn to drive till I was 30. It wasn’t necessary in the big city. But then one day I was riding the subway and I watched someone spill their food all over a guy in a suit who was on his way to work. Shortly thereafter, someone who absolutely stunk and was covered in sweat got on and sat beside me-against me-because the train was full. She started fanning her face with her hand and I could taste the fumes from her body heat. When I got up to stand rather than deal with her any longer, the entire left side of my body was soaked through with her sweat. I was horrified and mere seconds from an important meeting. Right then and there I changed my mind about transit and city life and decided that I needed a car, because that quality of life was not for me. Later that week, while I was pumping coins into a machine to buy a subway token, a woman who was unstable walked up to me and spit in my face; starting ranting and screaming about how I’d put my fingers in her mouth. A month later, my aunt was riding the subway when someone beside her bit into a shawarma and the juice sprayed across her face. This was over a decade ago now. But more recently, women are being lit on fire by lunatics on the subway. It’s happened more than one time. And you ask why people would rather be in their car? Yes, I’d rather be in my air conditioned car for an hour than experience any of that again for a fraction of an instant, thank you very much. But this is just my privileged upper-middle class perspective. Simply put, there are those who can’t afford ANYTHING in these walkable cities. For the majority of people it’s not a choice. You should know this. You talked about the housing crisis, then you contradicted the reality of it. Convenience comes with a price tag, or we’d all be living in Manhattan. Cost of living is much lower in some of the places you mentioned, and people are going to go where they can afford to be. So tackle the cost of living and the violence first and maybe we can talk about this in realistic terms. I get it-in theory. I was born and raised in a city of 8 million people. I loved walking everywhere. I miss the convenience of everything and always trying something new. But I didn’t have to drag around kids or try to lug home several 10-foot baseboards and six cans of paint on crowded transit. I miss the fresh air and the sense of community. Transit was fine, too... until it wasn’t. And these days, our cities cannot keep up with the demand because we’re already decades and decade behind. There’s no catching up at this point. If North America had modeled itself after Europe from the beginning, I’d say you have an argument, but what you’re talking about would require razing the US and Canada to the ground and starting over with a blank patch of dirt. You show me a four bedroom, four thousand square foot house with a two-car garage in the middle of Manhattan-one that the average family can afford-and I will eat my words. Until then, nothing you can say will convince people like me to give up our cars completely or to live stacked under/over people ever again. For those who enjoy it, more power to you. But I value my space and my privacy and my family’s ability to grow. Expanding up isn’t for everyone. Where I live now is still suburbia, but I am lucky that it’s in a smaller city of 400,000. I can still walk to the post office in 15-20 minutes on a nice day, or ride my bike downtown for dinner. But grocery shopping for my family is simply not feasible without a car, especially in the dead of winter, or when it’s sweltering hot outside. So, for me, a lot of these opinions against suburban sprawl often come from people who don’t have to support large growing families. Personally, I choose hot over cold because of a seasonal disorder. I used to suffer from chronic depression for decades, and then I stopped living in a cold winter climate and the problem went away. If it means I have to sacrifice the walkable city life I very much enjoyed when I was young and single… so be it. I can’t afford-nor do I have an interest in-engaging in the same type of life I had twenty years ago. I don’t want to pay for a gym, or wrestle sweaty people to get on a hot subway, or pay condo fees to be stacked like Lego, or listen to construction, or go out for dinner every night in the city. I have real priorities now and they begin and end with doing what’s best for my family and how much we can do from the comfort of home, where we’re saving money and not increasing debt to live outside of our means. You know what I hear when I open my windows? Birds. Nothing but birds. Not traffic. Not honking. Not people. Not jackhammers. Birds. So do I want to spend a million dollars to squeeze my family into 350 sq ft in the city…? Or do I want to spend half that and get a 4000 sq ft house even though I’ll have to drive everywhere? Hmmmm. And there’s your answer. Much as I agree with everything you say in concept and in principle… it’s just not a reality for some. Not with current prices or given the way our countries are designed. In lieu of a time machine, we do the best we can with what we have. Prices increase the closer you get to the heart of things… and they decrease as you lose walkability. Extend a subway or train into the neighborhood and prices shoot up by the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the reality of things. But yes, I believe that cities could do more to cool down the effects of all that pavement and glass to make it better for those who DO want to live in the city. Not everywhere can bury their parking lots, though. It’s not physically possible in certain terrain. But they can build garages with green rooftops and take real strides to diffuse the heat. Just for context… I live in a highly desirable and walkable city know for its greenery and trails. I bought this home in 2020. Now, nearing the end of 2024, the value has gone up $700,000 since I bought it. That’s insane. Great for me, but not so good for people who can’t afford walkable cities. Asking why people don’t simply make the CHOICE to go elsewhere is rather oversimplified and tonedeaf if you don’t look at the market.
I mean, you can only sprawl so much before you run out of space. That’s just a common sense observation. Destroying nature so you can have your little 3 room shack in a neighborhood without sidewalks is an impressive lack of foresight.
Except you can only sprawl out to a point where commuting to work is unfeasible even by car. Who wants to sit for two hours in traffic created by the suburban sprawl that is laid out so that all forms of getting about are impossible, too dangerous, or impractical except by car? Yet California now has what is known as supercommuters who live as far out as Bakersfield or Fresno and drive into L.A. or San Francisco! Eventually that won't be doable because the amount of traffic could cause gridlock on the freeways into the city.
You mock people that don’t spend time outside or want to spend time in walkable neighborhoods, but you also ignore that most of our walkable dense neighborhoods and transit are riddles with drug use and crime. People want to be safe. They feel safe in large homes in the suburbs. They feel safe in their cars. It’s rational to want to spend an hour in a car with the doors locked over 45 minutes on a train next to some crazy yelling obscenities and being pick-pocketed. We can attract people to walkable neighborhoods and transit when governments get serious about drug use and crime. Until then, if you’re going to be holed up into your home anyway, might as well do it someplace sunny and warm.
You raise several valid points. In a sense, you seem to be saying that the “hot, dry, suburban world of AC and car centricity and urban sprawl” is a necessary outcome of feeling unsafe in walkable urban areas. In many cases this is true. Took a train ride a while back and the conductor assigned passengers to certain seats. Ended up seated next to someone with significant emotional issues and behavioral problems. I got up ASAP and relocated to the observation car. Whew! Took a bus once and a passenger and the bus driver got into a heated argument. Driver decided to call the cops. Meanwhile passengers had to sit on the bus until the matter was resolved, wait for the next one, or get off and walk. Would have been much better in my 120 thousand dollar SUV so it would seem. Another time I had to assist a passenger having an epileptic fit. Didn’t mind helping but I didn’t expect to be asked to do something like that on my way to the beach. And one more incident: an overworked, tired bus driver kept swerving on a freeway and almost hit the guardrail and probably would have if I didn’t yell “Watch out.” Fortunately I sat adjacent to him near the front door. I had a feeling when boarding that the bus that he wasn’t all there! Got off that bus and waited for another to arrive with wife and kids in tow. Reported the incident when I disembarked. Of course having your own car is not a panacea. Lots can go wrong while driving too, and much much worse. Seems like there is no such thing as a Shangri-La for the average person these days. Let’s be thankful it isn’t worse. Gotta count our blessings! Oh yes, wanna be a novelist? Use mass transit!!!
In lived in Boston for 10 years and only had one bad experience with public transportation (crazy person shouting). In 15 years in the suburbs I've been in 2 car accidents, both of which were entirely the other person's fault, and one of which put me in the hospital. Driving is statistically by far the most dangerous activity the average person participates in. Worst thing about living in the city is having to be confronted with the existence of homeless people instead of pretending they don't exist, but they never did anything to me, unless making me feel bad by existing counts. For drug use and crime I'd need to go looking for it in a ghetto. Otherwise nobody is dodging bullets walking to work, we're not living in some dystopian 1970s gang violence movie. Not in the Northeast anyway. The West Coast sounds like it has legitimate issues, but maybe I'm falling for the same sensationalist media coverage that forms the opinion of others about the Northeast.
@@maninredhelm Statistics show drug use and crime on transit are both increasing. Doesn't matter that you don't mind seeing weirdos and drug addicts on the train and in the city, and that they never bothered you. They bother the majority of Americans and most people would rather take their chances in a car and drive to a strip mall than take transit and walk to a restaurant in the city center and be accosted by a tweeker.
People want sprawl. We want to be as far away from other people as possible. If you work remotely like I do, you never need to leave the house. I don't think cities are the solution for everyone. Better to invest in the drastic reduction of the need for personal vehicles. Once you can get a Waymo car in a couple minutes and take it anywhere within 100 miles, space allocated to parking lots and garages can start to be reclaimed.
Cities would be a better solution for nearly everyone if they were designed better and were more affordable. I work remote and "never need to leave the house". I still chose to live in a dense, walkable, public transit rich part of my city. Not heart of downtown like when I was working in office but still inner ring neighborhood. I have a car but don't need or use it on a day to day basis. Within walking distance there are a bunch of parks, trails, restaurants, bars, lounges, museums, public art, cool architecture, stores, etc. along with most of my local friends. I live two blocks from a central bus hub with buses every few minutes at peak hours that can take me downtown in 20 minutes which has a lot of great stuff to do and has an amtrak/greyhound/megabus station which can take me to a bunch of other cities for weekend trips. It's great. This is only doable cuz the city I'm in is still relatively affordable (although sadly that is rapidly changing) so I could afford a spacious condo and have money left over to make it really nice and comfortable. The weather is also good enough here year round to enjoy these amenities if you don't mind the cold/snow/rain (you can always put on more layers there are only so many you can take off). Unfortunately this is not something that most people within the US have access to :( I think if more people did there would be a lot of people who want it. My parents lived in a suburban home for 20+ years and recently moved to a condo in a new dense development despite never thinking they would want to live in an urban environment. They love it and it's massively improved their quality of life.
@@anon-ju9bg I am in suburbia. Trains and buses do not come within walking distance of my house. I am not able to bike or walk long distances. Would you rather everyone like me own our own car? It would be smarter to have them available on-demand and save me $40,000.
Given the choice of living in a city or being forced to own a car, I will choose the car. I *hate* cities and will not live in one. There are many like me and more every day.
@@adisario What is it about cities that you hate? Specifically, what is it that you hate that could not be addressed with better urban planning. Many of us agree that in the US at least most cities are horribly planned and managed and not great. That is why we are so deadset of fixing it. On the flipside to cities what is it about rural life that you don't like such that you chose a suburb instead? The suburbs often inherently by their nature lack both the benefits of rural and urban life although there are some examples of streetcar suburbs and others that are built with dense housing around a trainline that can have many urban benefits.
What a great channel! Finally, found a place to go to hear someone talk about, someone that cares about,all this sweltering heat we’ve been having! Was beginning to think that nobody really gave a hoot about it. Where I live, people just seem to grin and bear it -utilities costs are probably the highest in the country. Not a day passes that I don’t think about leaving this unlivable place. The fascinating thing is that none of these places you’re talking about actually say much about how hot it is there. There also seems to be no sense that the western/southwestern part of the country is basically desert land. When you think of Las Vegas, you really don’t think of high heat, extreme heat; you think of casinos. Something has to be done about this huge swath of land that’s really a massive furnace. I’m glad your channel is taking a good hard look at it. I’ve noticed that the weather services seem to intentionally provide lower temperature readings than the reality of the heat on the ground. They say it’s 100. My thermometers say it’s 115! Seems like they are hiding the truth since if people knew how hot it really was they wouldn’t leave the house and that would hurt businesses.
I live in Phoenix and will absolutely leave next year
I wish you well!@@jasonhertzberg4818
Tucson resident here. I want to start off by saying that I am an urbanist, I hate sprawl, and recognize the need for density and further climate adaptation. I have lived here car free for years. Transit is lacking but often still usable. Tucson is also known as a bike city, with many miles of separated bike paths around town as well as a network of low stress streets to navigate across town. It has a unique culture, influenced by Indigenous, Mexican, and American cultures coming together, and some truly amazing food. The geographic setting is incredible, with striking mountains in every direction and countless species of unique desert adapted plants and animals. The heat is difficult to manage for a few months out of the year, but I think the amount of perfect weather days in the cooler months makes it worth it. As bad as the heat is, I prefer it to a climate where it can be both sweltering and humid in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. But of course these same issues of poor urban development are a major frustration for me on a daily basis, and I have considered moving because of it.
That being said, I feel like this video is somewhat lacking. The fact that you called the Hohokam "primitive" really betrays your lack of research. They created hundreds of miles of irrigation canals to farm and developed an incredibly complex society. The modern O'odham people are generally considered to be the descendants of the Hohokam... and they live in the exact same region, not "escaping" to somewhere else.
You also claim that there was no reason for people to move to the desert before air conditioning... that is not true. Irrigated agriculture in deserts is extremely productive because you can grow two crops a year when there is no frost. This is part of why Phoenix was founded as an agricultural settlement. You showed the image of the dry Salt River, but not the massive network of canals that enabled the development of the area. Tucson was also in a fertile valley and a natural stop on established trade routes. It was founded in 1775, and has been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years before. Both cities were founded in locations with access to water year round. Many old buildings in Tucson and Phoenix were constructed out of adobe, a material that provides a natural cooling effect. Even before air conditioning, evaporative cooling systems were common. I actually lived in house with only evaporative cooling for many years, and it can be very effective in the dry climate. Shade is important too, as in a dry heat the temperature in the shade can be almost 15 degrees cooler than the temperature in the sun. I often sit outside on very hot days, enjoying the cool shade. That is not possible in a humid climate. There are many ways to adapt to a desert climate, and really the issue has been that the people who moved to Arizona from across the country brought the poorly adapted generic American sprawl urban form and plopped it here, not the climate itself.
Plus, the idea that "settlements in deserts are antithetical to long term prosperity" is frankly laughable. Someone should tell the Egyptians. Unless Cairo is doomed to become a ghost town too. Humans have lived in desert cities as long as agricultural society has existed, and the idea that only cities in temperate climates are "habitable" is, to me, very eurocentric and simply not true.
The truth is, every major city in America, even the ones with dense, walkable cores, have a huge percentage of the residents in their urban areas living in suburban sprawl, regardless of climate. Sure, Chicago has a dense core city, but it is still surrounded by a truly massive ring of sprawl with a population that far exceeds that of the central city. Even New York City has Long Island. NIMBYism and pro-sprawl ideology are hardly confined to the Sun Belt. Maybe these desert cities will empty out, doomed by the dominant urban form of the post war boom years. Only time will tell. But I strongly believe that sustainable cities can exist in deserts provided proper adaptation, and that Phoenix and Tucson were natural locations for humans to form major settlements. Las Vegas, well... no argument there!
Many good points. This video was not well researched. I don't know if he could respond effectively given that he doesn't even know about indigenous water irrigation, or that he doesn't even know how people even lived in Arizona before air conditioning... That's just ignorance. It's only one of the greatest examples ever of how to adapt to living in a dry climate. There are histories beyond this "manifest destiny" mindset, and they're not being regarded in the slightest sense.
Can you make a video about urbanism in desolate American regions? Like Alaska in winter
definitely!
@@fourth_place Or even Canadian cities and how they compare... I'm in Edmonton and while it's suffering it's nothing like what you're seeing in the USA... Even with -40c and +40c being normal now... We've made some great strides like eliminating parking minimums and upzoning the entire city to include up to 8 units on a single family lot, I believe as well as spending $100M to create a comprehensive cycle network as well as doubling the size of our LRT... All while adding 1.2M residents in 10 years as projected... Half in the current inner city/suburbs and half in new sprawling ones south of town... Over the last 10 years only Orlando grew faster as a metro... Edmonton tied with Austin at 22% population growth to O-Town's 23%
@@fourth_place looking forward 2 it!
New York City’s 90 degrees is more bearable than Phoenix’s 90 degrees? You’re joking, right? Here in New York City we have this thing called humidity. Combine that with the urban heat island effect, something I’m sure a smart guy like you is very familiar with, the the shade of the buildings provide very little relief. Okay so maybe NYC’s 90 degrees is more bearable than Phoenix’s 110 degrees. But more bearable than Phoenix’s 90 degrees? As a person who has experienced both humid 90 degrees and dry 90 degrees, don’t make me laugh.
(Although I’ll understand if the following makes YOU laugh. You know what makes the heat and humidity bearable for me? Bike riding. When you walk or just sit around doing nothing, the humidity keeps your sweat from evaporating; it can’t do its job. But when bike riding, you create a breeze for yourself. The air hitting your perspiration helps it evaporate; you cool down as a result.)
LA is NOT a desert city like Phoenix or Las Vegas. It has a Mediterranean climate. Winters are mild with light rain while summers are dry and warm but NOT HOT.
Lumping them as the same is wrong. LA is also way denser and has a large and growing mass transit system.
Depends on which LA you are talking about... Old CLASSIC LA? Correct... But if you're talking GREATER L.A. including the Inland Empire, Antelope Valley? You're definitely talking desert like conditions... With it being one huge sprawl it now covers several biomes... And of course this is where people are moving to right now... Explosive growth in I.E. Palmdale, etc.
The thing about LA that definitely is desert-like is the relatively low amount of rainfall the area receives. It’s an arid or at best a semi arid climate. Have you ever viewed the city from the air during the day while landing at the airports? It would be difficult to miss the two main reasons not to spend any significant amount of time there….smog and extreme car centricity! People know this but they live there anyway!?
@@dolittle6781LA has gotten drier in recent years. It used to rain more often than now
To the commenters, LA is a Mediterranean climate and biome, not a desert/arid. Parts of LA's metro do reach into the High Desert though. The past few years had been some of the wettest in LA, though last year was just average. LA's sprawl is crazy, but the heart of the city is actually quite dense with several walkable sections. Some of the country's densest neighborhoods are actually in LA. Even suburbs like Compton have been amping up bike infrastructure. And there are bus and train lines that get completely packed.
My friend moved to the Phoenix metro because it's the center of the US Semiconductor industry. He HAD to move there for his job.
Desert cities have added a ton of homes while many older cities have seen less job and housing growth. Why move to a cooler more walkable city when there are no newer homes and little good paying jobs?
Well, this is true! Hard to argue with that! People do need jobs and new affordable housing. At the risk of sounding like an idealist, it would be great if we could base our decision on where to live according to how friendly people are there. In my experience, people make the place! In truth, a lot of the money you would earn in these semi conductor cities is likely thrown away on the expense of car ownership. There’s obviously lots of things to consider.
Well, the job thing can’t be argued with, but why are companies moving there? It’s usually because the cities let them contribute to the sprawl by offering them good prices on land outside of the center of the city. As far as “new” homes, that’s just a personal preference. I prefer historical architecture, but I’m ok with “new” if it’s built the “non-sprawl” way, which it usually isn’t in these sun-belt cities.
@@knowledgeandpleasure Wikipedia says companies move there because of low property costs. You are right about housing and personal preferences. For me safety and peace and quiet rank near the top of the list.
@@knowledgeandpleasure I don't have an issue working away from home but so many jobs I have found that haven't been very close to frequent public transit or otherwise take over 90 minutes to commute to haven't paid that well, a reason that after I have found out about the salaries that such jobs have offered I have simply moved on or later withdrawn my candidacy. Why commute to a job that will pay nowhere close to the cost of commuting to it if public transport is poor or otherwise is unavailable? The London, Ontario🇨🇦-born Amsterdam🇳🇱-based Not Just Bikes TH-cam man and other TH-camrs who have claimed to have given 👎 to urban sprawl all have a point. There's a reason the Australian Outback and Sahara Desert are so sparsely populated: temperatures are so hot, with sources of water hard to find, that there's little point living in those areas.
There is plenty of exisiting housing stock in northern cities many rust belt ciites are FAR below their peak population and new construction is not necessary and contributes to global warming.
8:17 what? Bro the dry heat of the southwest is WAY MORE tolerable than any mega humid Northeast city at the same temperature. That’s crazy. Also today’s high is 93° in Vegas no clue where you are getting 106° figure.
I included the date in the card (9/6/24) of making the video as “today’s high” because…you know…it takes weeks to make these things.
Bro, the dry heat of the SW is a great way to die without knowing heat stroke is getting you since it's so dry you don't realize you are sweating End of the day, total 115⁰+ days are totaled in months not days for large swaths of the SW...
Though the same argument can be made for the NE though in winter when the SW and such is very comfortable for the most part...
So basically, everyone should move to CA, it's like Goldilocks - not to hot or to cold for most of the state's major population centers...at least here all you will do is die of indebtedness 😆
@@fourth_place yes that’s my bad, I didn’t see the fine print! But you didn’t mention anything about the dry and humid heat difference at the same temperature…
@@triaxe-mmb I’ll take dry heat over Wet bulb nightmare humid heat any of the week.
Hey, I say this with no ill will...as a general rule, referring to native tribes and their settlements as "primitive" is fairly disrespectful and not cool to say the least. Not even getting into the fact that these settlements actually had some remarkable works of engineering and careful planning built into their very foundations, that term itself is a very loaded one. It was broadly used to justify westerner's expansion and genocide of the native people through the racist ideas of western (white) superiority over "primitive" people. I don't think you meant anything by it other than to say it was an earlier settlement from an earlier group of people, but that language is and was very harmful both in terms of the people and their descendants that fell directly victim to its consequences and the preservation of these sites and the cultures of the people who lived in them.
Post-record I definitely thought about using a different word but got too deep into the process and left it in. I think my original thinking was like…this tribe existed looooong ago…I mean they died out around the time of Socrates. I mention socrates because, I think it’s a fair comparison to make because even in terms of what the ancient greeks were doing…the Hohokam WERE quite primitive, let alone compared to modern day western civilizations. So, on the one hand I think “primitive” wasn’t exactly the right word to use, but at the same time, it is accurate all things considered. As far as the “genocide” goes…that’s really where you lose me. Native Americans “genocided” way more Native Americans than Europeans ever did throughout time. That side of history isn’t really taught as much though…
@@fourth_place The history you’re claiming isn’t taught much is that way because the vast majority of peoples who would have been able to pass that historical knowledge on perished as part of the over 90% of the native population that died as a direct result of European colonization. In addition to the introduction of an array of devastating diseases, colonial powers and their progeny made concerted efforts to remove, slaughter, and assimilate native peoples as they took their lands destroying their cultures on levels both physical and sociological. The Trail of Tears might be the most infamous example of this, but it was hardly an isolated incident. Roughly 98% of ancestral homeland is gone, and the people who lived there either relocated or dead.
To this day native populations make up less than 3% of the US population, and only 5% in Canada. This is in large part due to the deaths, but genocides aren’t just about killings: they’re about cultural erasure. The US and Canadian governments made concerted efforts to forcibly assimilate native populations through the suppression of their religions, languages, and cultural practices. In a very literal sense, native populations were assimilated into white colonial populations through a lot of nonconsensual marriages and untold scores of acts of sexual violence towards native women. In fact, sexual violence towards native women remains a serious issue to this day, which brings us back to how this is an ongoing thing.
The language and rhetoric of using words like “primitive” to describe native populations has been an encouraging element in people justifying and dismissing this atrocities in the past, at the time, and through today. And I’ve been focusing on North America a lot here, but Central and South America are also part of this. Actively, right now, there are native communities that have to deal with governments and corporations taking their lands and even just literally massacring them. Among the peoples still native to the Amazon, for instance, they deal with a very real, constant threat from loggers and settlers. In addition to the unrecorded events lost to time, we have instances where, for instance, a community was murdered all the way down to one man. The local government had to create a perimeter around this sole survivor and had to watch him and all of his people’s culture slowly die…and that is exactly what happened. His death occurred in 2022. Two years ago.
We don’t know his name, his language, what his people called themselves, or really much else about his people…but we do know of Socrates.
I give you a lot of benefit of the doubt that this is just a subject for which you require further reading. Still, doubling down on that term is one thing, but being dismissive of the genocide perpetrated against native peoples whilst insinuating that they did it more to themselves? That is a whole other thing. At any rate, I wouldn’t have written all that if I didn’t think you capable of evolving in this topic. Maybe it won’t all happen today, but hopefully someday.
Because some of us don't have the means and hearing well offs repeating wHy dOnT YOu jUst lEaVE is getting mighty old.
yeah, that’s why I said IF…
We need a video on the state zoning enabling act(SZEA) and state city planning enabling act(SCPEA) of 1916 .
The main culprits and perpetrators need to be exposed !
Indeed. Those Acts were in response to filthy, run-down, disease-ridden and pestilential slums of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Propaganda of the time showed large Victorian and Edwardian homes on large suburban lots to provide the ideal living conditions and this was before the automobile took over!
You really shouldn't fight with commenters in your videos. Especially a random comment with 5 likes. I'm sure people click for the title of the video, not for online drama.
As someone who has lived in 2 cities in the NE Corridor and both metros of the Pacific Northwest I have a couple of observations along these lines. 1) San Antonio and Austin have a lot more in common with climate and traffic than most reports mention (IMO, ppl just give Austin a pass.) All Texas cities don't fare well in the psychometric chart. 2)I don't speak for AZ, but with the elevations in New Mexico the climate isn't that bad. It would never be a region to support millions, but can offer acceptable temperature ranges with some adaptations. 3) Water scarcity issues in the SW are connected to Industrial and Agri based over usage. The region supported relatively large prehistoric populations. 5) My location here after experience in the urbanist meccas is primarily economic with a scenic silver lining. I felt those places were really exacerbating income divides with housing scarcities. 6) I find the experience of harnessing solar and wind power potentials and usage near the source as a REAL stab at long range human sustainability and a much better use of my short time on the planet. Much of YIMBY culture comes off as self-centered at the amenities of urban life rather than the realities of solving big issues for generations to come.
Great video, I totally agree. You should come to StL when you leave LA! We are the most underrated city in the world, and I hope people start leaving these arid climates soon and help revitalize the Lou to our former urbanist glory! :]
I love phoenix so much but I'm going insane living somewhere where the only natural greenery area within 30 min of my house (that isn't a golf course) is a tiny riparian preserve. I work at a golf course filled with unmaintained wild areas and it makes me sad that we mindlessly paved over so many wonderful and diverse ecosystems filled with quail, coyotes, jackrabbits, vultures, hawks, and other amazing desert inhabitants you will RARELY see in areas of urban sprawl today.
I always wanted to live where I work where I play and have no car.
Phoenix native of 23 years here, there are a few reasons that kept me from leaving however as each year keeps getting worse I find it harder to keep making excuses. Never the less some of the reasons include:
- affordablilty and a mild fear of leaving. You see Pheonix is relatively affordable in terms of cost of living. I can’t really afford to move to cities like San Francisco or New York because cost of living is too much. Plus as Phoenix gets more populated, housing is going to follow. Being a native I have an advantage of already being here as the city gets improved around me and I am seeing change. They’re extending the light rail and they’ve reintroduced the streetcar in Tempe where I live now. The housing is switching to more multifamily focused style and transit is getting an overhaul with nicer buses. I have no real articles to back that up it’s just what I’m visually seeing. There’s also a new no car neighborhood that was built called Culdesac not far from where I live. It’s giving me hope that the city is trying to be better and I don’t want to leave right as they’re making changes only to come back and realize it’s expensive and hard to get a house now.
Other reasons include:
- my entire family lives here
- the winters here are gorgeous and from December to February the weather is always around 70-75 degrees
- there are over 300 days of sunshine which means on the days where it’s not unbearable (usually after a good rainstorm when it’s 10-20 degrees cooler) you’re basically guaranteed to to have a sunny day.
- the vast amount of great hiking and sweeping views from mountains like South Mountain, Camelback mountain, Piestawa peak, hole in the wall, the Papago buttes, and others
- the Sonoran desert is classified as a wet desert which means that we get monsoon season (a period of massive thunderstorms that lasts from late August to early October) which causes the valley to have flora unlike anywhere else in the world.
- the great bird and butterfly migration where thousands of birds and butterflies stop by in phoenix on the way to Mexico for the winter. (So many monarch butterfly its beautiful)
- And some of the greatest sunsets in the world. Seriously they’re so great because of the dust in the air that the refraction cause scenes out of a fantasy.
I’m not really sure why Albuquerque was mentioned in this video alongside of Phoenix and Las Vegas. Albuquerque is at a high altitude. As such, the hottest month is July with an average temperature of 94 degrees. June and August are the only other months with average temps in the 90s. This is much milder than both Phoenix and Las Vegas.
One thing you say that isn't quite accurate. . . You say that Phoenix is hitting 100 until November. However, the latest in the year it has ever hit 100 in Phoenix is October 27, 2016. Also, the official temperature in Phoenix is measured at the airport, which has some of the highest temperatures in the valley. Where people actually live is usually 3 to 5 degrees cooler.
LA is a glorified desert. super dry super hot and no rain for months and months. not a drop of rain. sounds like a desert to me. i am also counting the days to leave.
Thank you for the informative video. Clearly, these sunbelt cities are becoming utterly uninhabitable because of excessive heat. The vast urban sprawl has also made many of these places unattractive, uninviting, and depressing. Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in California in the '60s and '70s. I loathed the ubiquitous freeways, wide roads, traffic, and strip developments. All those years ago, I wanted to return to the fatherland. Now retired (after teaching outside of London for 31 years), I live in beautiful, historic Middelburg--a 15 minute city. Although the weather is often wet and windy, I can walk, cycle or take the train easily. I no longer have a car, and I feel utterly liberated and joyful. American city planners should look to the Dutch for some expert advice.
I stayed in Phoenix because all my stuff is here and it would take so much money and effort to move. It's nice about 8 months out of the year. We also have a major airport here with several discount airlines. Cooler weather is only a short plane ride away.
12:26 RIVERSIDE MENTIONED 🔔🔔🔔🔔
Want a compact city in the heat? Visit Singapore... It has much of what you talk about which makes it one of the most livable places on earth much less in such a hot climate....
Singapore has plenty of water though. LA and Phoenix and Las Vegas do not.
@Trailerparkwarlock Yeah they're not taking into account tropical verses desert.
based for calling out the illegal immigration issue
Are you going to just completely ignore the fact that these have been the fastest growing cities in the country for the past several decades?
The point of the video is to show this isn’t sustainable and will invert much like the rust belt cities of the past did, but potentially even worse.
Why do people opt for sprawl over density? Price and affordability, and value for space. I mean, just to examine both sides of the argument: the most walkable cities in North America are also the most expensive. I left condo life in the city and opted for suburbia because I can get a 4000 square-foot house with four bedrooms and a den and an office and a home gym and a pool and a sauna and a two- or three-car garage for the same price as a studio apartment in the city with no balcony. And there are no HOA fees to burden me. This is what my growing family needs to thrive and to be successful working from home. I’ve also grown tired of the noise and the inconvenience of sharing a building with other people. I don’t want to wait for an elevator and take multiple trips up and down unloading the groceries when I can pop in and out of my garage straight into the kitchen.
I didn’t learn to drive till I was 30. It wasn’t necessary in the big city. But then one day I was riding the subway and I watched someone spill their food all over a guy in a suit who was on his way to work. Shortly thereafter, someone who absolutely stunk and was covered in sweat got on and sat beside me-against me-because the train was full. She started fanning her face with her hand and I could taste the fumes from her body heat. When I got up to stand rather than deal with her any longer, the entire left side of my body was soaked through with her sweat. I was horrified and mere seconds from an important meeting. Right then and there I changed my mind about transit and city life and decided that I needed a car, because that quality of life was not for me. Later that week, while I was pumping coins into a machine to buy a subway token, a woman who was unstable walked up to me and spit in my face; starting ranting and screaming about how I’d put my fingers in her mouth. A month later, my aunt was riding the subway when someone beside her bit into a shawarma and the juice sprayed across her face. This was over a decade ago now. But more recently, women are being lit on fire by lunatics on the subway. It’s happened more than one time. And you ask why people would rather be in their car? Yes, I’d rather be in my air conditioned car for an hour than experience any of that again for a fraction of an instant, thank you very much.
But this is just my privileged upper-middle class perspective. Simply put, there are those who can’t afford ANYTHING in these walkable cities. For the majority of people it’s not a choice. You should know this. You talked about the housing crisis, then you contradicted the reality of it. Convenience comes with a price tag, or we’d all be living in Manhattan. Cost of living is much lower in some of the places you mentioned, and people are going to go where they can afford to be. So tackle the cost of living and the violence first and maybe we can talk about this in realistic terms.
I get it-in theory. I was born and raised in a city of 8 million people. I loved walking everywhere. I miss the convenience of everything and always trying something new. But I didn’t have to drag around kids or try to lug home several 10-foot baseboards and six cans of paint on crowded transit. I miss the fresh air and the sense of community. Transit was fine, too... until it wasn’t. And these days, our cities cannot keep up with the demand because we’re already decades and decade behind. There’s no catching up at this point. If North America had modeled itself after Europe from the beginning, I’d say you have an argument, but what you’re talking about would require razing the US and Canada to the ground and starting over with a blank patch of dirt.
You show me a four bedroom, four thousand square foot house with a two-car garage in the middle of Manhattan-one that the average family can afford-and I will eat my words. Until then, nothing you can say will convince people like me to give up our cars completely or to live stacked under/over people ever again. For those who enjoy it, more power to you. But I value my space and my privacy and my family’s ability to grow. Expanding up isn’t for everyone. Where I live now is still suburbia, but I am lucky that it’s in a smaller city of 400,000. I can still walk to the post office in 15-20 minutes on a nice day, or ride my bike downtown for dinner. But grocery shopping for my family is simply not feasible without a car, especially in the dead of winter, or when it’s sweltering hot outside. So, for me, a lot of these opinions against suburban sprawl often come from people who don’t have to support large growing families.
Personally, I choose hot over cold because of a seasonal disorder. I used to suffer from chronic depression for decades, and then I stopped living in a cold winter climate and the problem went away. If it means I have to sacrifice the walkable city life I very much enjoyed when I was young and single… so be it. I can’t afford-nor do I have an interest in-engaging in the same type of life I had twenty years ago. I don’t want to pay for a gym, or wrestle sweaty people to get on a hot subway, or pay condo fees to be stacked like Lego, or listen to construction, or go out for dinner every night in the city. I have real priorities now and they begin and end with doing what’s best for my family and how much we can do from the comfort of home, where we’re saving money and not increasing debt to live outside of our means. You know what I hear when I open my windows? Birds. Nothing but birds. Not traffic. Not honking. Not people. Not jackhammers. Birds. So do I want to spend a million dollars to squeeze my family into 350 sq ft in the city…? Or do I want to spend half that and get a 4000 sq ft house even though I’ll have to drive everywhere? Hmmmm.
And there’s your answer. Much as I agree with everything you say in concept and in principle… it’s just not a reality for some. Not with current prices or given the way our countries are designed. In lieu of a time machine, we do the best we can with what we have. Prices increase the closer you get to the heart of things… and they decrease as you lose walkability. Extend a subway or train into the neighborhood and prices shoot up by the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the reality of things. But yes, I believe that cities could do more to cool down the effects of all that pavement and glass to make it better for those who DO want to live in the city. Not everywhere can bury their parking lots, though. It’s not physically possible in certain terrain. But they can build garages with green rooftops and take real strides to diffuse the heat.
Just for context… I live in a highly desirable and walkable city know for its greenery and trails. I bought this home in 2020. Now, nearing the end of 2024, the value has gone up $700,000 since I bought it. That’s insane. Great for me, but not so good for people who can’t afford walkable cities. Asking why people don’t simply make the CHOICE to go elsewhere is rather oversimplified and tonedeaf if you don’t look at the market.
Cities get so much more bang for their buck for the land and resources than suburbs and it’s not particularly close.
I mean, you can only sprawl so much before you run out of space. That’s just a common sense observation. Destroying nature so you can have your little 3 room shack in a neighborhood without sidewalks is an impressive lack of foresight.
Except you can only sprawl out to a point where commuting to work is unfeasible even by car. Who wants to sit for two hours in traffic created by the suburban sprawl that is laid out so that all forms of getting about are impossible, too dangerous, or impractical except by car? Yet California now has what is known as supercommuters who live as far out as Bakersfield or Fresno and drive into L.A. or San Francisco! Eventually that won't be doable because the amount of traffic could cause gridlock on the freeways into the city.
You mock people that don’t spend time outside or want to spend time in walkable neighborhoods, but you also ignore that most of our walkable dense neighborhoods and transit are riddles with drug use and crime. People want to be safe. They feel safe in large homes in the suburbs. They feel safe in their cars. It’s rational to want to spend an hour in a car with the doors locked over 45 minutes on a train next to some crazy yelling obscenities and being pick-pocketed. We can attract people to walkable neighborhoods and transit when governments get serious about drug use and crime. Until then, if you’re going to be holed up into your home anyway, might as well do it someplace sunny and warm.
You raise several valid points. In a sense, you seem to be saying that the “hot, dry, suburban world of AC and car centricity and urban sprawl” is a necessary outcome of feeling unsafe in walkable urban areas. In many cases this is true.
Took a train ride a while back and the conductor assigned passengers to certain seats. Ended up seated next to someone with significant emotional issues and behavioral problems. I got up ASAP and relocated to the observation car. Whew! Took a bus once and a passenger and the bus driver got into a heated argument. Driver decided to call the cops. Meanwhile passengers had to sit on the bus until the matter was resolved, wait for the next one, or get off and walk. Would have been much better in my 120 thousand dollar SUV so it would seem. Another time I had to assist a passenger having an epileptic fit. Didn’t mind helping but I didn’t expect to be asked to do something like that on my way to the beach. And one more incident: an overworked, tired bus driver kept swerving on a freeway and almost hit the guardrail and probably would have if I didn’t yell “Watch out.” Fortunately I sat adjacent to him near the front door. I had a feeling when boarding that the bus that he wasn’t all there! Got off that bus and waited for another to arrive with wife and kids in tow. Reported the incident when I disembarked. Of course having your own car is not a panacea. Lots can go wrong while driving too, and much much worse. Seems like there is no such thing as a Shangri-La for the average person these days. Let’s be thankful it isn’t worse. Gotta count our blessings! Oh yes, wanna be a novelist? Use mass transit!!!
In lived in Boston for 10 years and only had one bad experience with public transportation (crazy person shouting). In 15 years in the suburbs I've been in 2 car accidents, both of which were entirely the other person's fault, and one of which put me in the hospital. Driving is statistically by far the most dangerous activity the average person participates in. Worst thing about living in the city is having to be confronted with the existence of homeless people instead of pretending they don't exist, but they never did anything to me, unless making me feel bad by existing counts. For drug use and crime I'd need to go looking for it in a ghetto. Otherwise nobody is dodging bullets walking to work, we're not living in some dystopian 1970s gang violence movie. Not in the Northeast anyway. The West Coast sounds like it has legitimate issues, but maybe I'm falling for the same sensationalist media coverage that forms the opinion of others about the Northeast.
Your anecdotal beliefs do not align with actual statistics
@@maninredhelm Statistics show drug use and crime on transit are both increasing. Doesn't matter that you don't mind seeing weirdos and drug addicts on the train and in the city, and that they never bothered you. They bother the majority of Americans and most people would rather take their chances in a car and drive to a strip mall than take transit and walk to a restaurant in the city center and be accosted by a tweeker.
People want sprawl. We want to be as far away from other people as possible. If you work remotely like I do, you never need to leave the house. I don't think cities are the solution for everyone. Better to invest in the drastic reduction of the need for personal vehicles. Once you can get a Waymo car in a couple minutes and take it anywhere within 100 miles, space allocated to parking lots and garages can start to be reclaimed.
Cities would be a better solution for nearly everyone if they were designed better and were more affordable. I work remote and "never need to leave the house". I still chose to live in a dense, walkable, public transit rich part of my city. Not heart of downtown like when I was working in office but still inner ring neighborhood. I have a car but don't need or use it on a day to day basis. Within walking distance there are a bunch of parks, trails, restaurants, bars, lounges, museums, public art, cool architecture, stores, etc. along with most of my local friends. I live two blocks from a central bus hub with buses every few minutes at peak hours that can take me downtown in 20 minutes which has a lot of great stuff to do and has an amtrak/greyhound/megabus station which can take me to a bunch of other cities for weekend trips. It's great.
This is only doable cuz the city I'm in is still relatively affordable (although sadly that is rapidly changing) so I could afford a spacious condo and have money left over to make it really nice and comfortable.
The weather is also good enough here year round to enjoy these amenities if you don't mind the cold/snow/rain (you can always put on more layers there are only so many you can take off).
Unfortunately this is not something that most people within the US have access to :( I think if more people did there would be a lot of people who want it. My parents lived in a suburban home for 20+ years and recently moved to a condo in a new dense development despite never thinking they would want to live in an urban environment. They love it and it's massively improved their quality of life.
Driverless cars? LOL. Trains, buses, bikes, walking are so much more space and cost efficient it’s not even close.
@@anon-ju9bg I am in suburbia. Trains and buses do not come within walking distance of my house. I am not able to bike or walk long distances. Would you rather everyone like me own our own car? It would be smarter to have them available on-demand and save me $40,000.
Given the choice of living in a city or being forced to own a car, I will choose the car. I *hate* cities and will not live in one. There are many like me and more every day.
@@adisario What is it about cities that you hate? Specifically, what is it that you hate that could not be addressed with better urban planning. Many of us agree that in the US at least most cities are horribly planned and managed and not great. That is why we are so deadset of fixing it.
On the flipside to cities what is it about rural life that you don't like such that you chose a suburb instead?
The suburbs often inherently by their nature lack both the benefits of rural and urban life although there are some examples of streetcar suburbs and others that are built with dense housing around a trainline that can have many urban benefits.