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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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The cost of commuting is just the tip, honestly.
The biggest expense is having to live near your employer, typically centrally-located in big cities with a high cost of living.
Also lost time commuting (especially if you can't afford to live nearby).
And also increased emissions, not only from driving yourself but a collective increase by way of traffic congestion.
Also allowing employees to work remotely massively increases the pool of employees to pull from.
This is why it's inevitable that remote work will win out. The companies which embrace it are going to beat their competition.
Yeah, the whole "get people back in the office to help real estate prices" isn't going to work either because it's false demand. A new company starting up has no reason to buy the bags the companies that decided to get into business real estate are now holding unless they actually need the office space, which isn't the case for most office jobs.
The last four decades of public policy and industry are largely an exercise in creating false demand for things.
Giant companies / industry will decide what happens, and they'll use the government if need be to get whatever it is they want.
It may not be a 1:1 but the costs (financial and time) are largely offset.
I live in a city, I don't own a car, I walk and ride a bike, and use public transportation and ride sharing. Granted, the convenience and cost savings can greatly depend on the city, how well it values pedestrians and public transportation, and if the housing market isn't stupid. I mean, I'm not talking about SF or NYC here.
The more people move back to cities, the more human-friendly they become. The more that people stay and spread further into the suburbs, the more they rely on private transportation and commuting for something like a quarter of their lives. Relative to a suburban life that relies on driving everywhere, my life is very low on stress and high on comfort. "Comfort", certainly, is relative. I can walk or take public transportation no more than twenty minutes to get to work or anywhere else.
City life can take a little more effort than stepping out of your front door into your car and dealing with traffic and spending money on gas and car insurance. But, aside from a decent pair of shoes and "comfort", it doesn't cost me anything to walk 10 minutes to my local market to spend $80 on a week's worth of food.
I do fully agree that remote work increases the employee pool and benefits employers. I'm just arguing on behalf of city life being more affordable and convenient than it's given credit for.
I'd also argue that the loss of office workers is having a very real impact on small businesses. Some of my favorite and dearly beloved businesses have closed in the past couple years because of the loss of office workers.
I think remote workers should be given a bonus, either by the state or their employer, for living in the city their company is based in. Ironically and with immense frustration, here in Philadelphia, our city actually taxes us for living AND/OR working here. Still, I would never move back to frustration of suburban life.
NYC and the costs are NOWHERE NEAR offset.
Then again, that is primarily because landlords are disgustingly greedy.
Higher cost of living (COL) areas do (at least sometimes) offset their costs. I think public transit availability is a very tiny piece of the puzzle in the US because unless you're talking a handful of cities the public transit in cities isn't guaranteed to be good enough to go car free. Additionally, many large offices are not located in transit available, urban locations (i.e. they're near cities, but not in cities).
However, the areas that offset their costs do so because people in low COL areas often make a pittalence in comparison to those living in high COL areas.
In a high COL area, you can forgo some of the COL by living a more meager lifestyle, but in a low COL area you cannot as easily make up the additional $20-30k a year salary difference.
If you work for a company and move, sometimes they'll even do the adjustment as a part of your move, and if you go from higher COL to lower COL they'll make sure your paycheck reflects that.
That's great that you have that but those options don't exist in most of the US.
I know. Most of the US is suburban and rural areas. That's my point - that living in a city is more convenient.
We're talking about cities...
83% of Americans live in urban areas. Maybe 10% of those have useable public transport. My city has a single train line and some buses that take roughly 4x longer to get where I'm going.
Public transportation is certainly an option in cities. Most suburbs I’ve been to at least have buses and ride share. Still, “most of the US” is rural and sprawling suburbs that do not have these options. If more people lived and worked in and near cities, the public transportation would have more public funding for improvements. Thankfully, this administration is looking into some very exciting improvements in our rail systems and offering more funding for cities for their own improvements. Fingers crossed.
Not in US cities.
I don't know how people feel the need to lie about things like this.
You're telling me that in the United State of America, there are cities that exist that do not have buses or subways or trollies or taxis or Ubers or bike shares? Please, tell me which city has none of these options?
No one is lying. There are options and there are viable options. A bus route 30 miles away does nothing to help you.
Ride shares are not public transportation. Bikes do no good if you don't have bike lanes to safely ride them in.
Plus all too often, buses have been the neglected stepchild of public transit and at least have the reputation of dirty, smelly, broken, crime ridden. I don’t think that’s true for the most part but there’s a psychological part to deal with, in addition to investing enough to keep things in good running order
WTF are you going on about? We’re talking about city bus routes to get you around town. Most bus routes are at most a ten minute walk. To claim that a city bus is 30 miles away is a verifiable lie. Do you not know what a city or a bus or a mile is?
While technically true, car and bike share aren’t publicly managed, they are affordable forms of transportation available to the public that negate the need to have a vehicle in a city.
LOOOOLOLOL okay go ahead and "verify" that nowhere in America is 30 miles from a bus stop. I'll wait.
You're doing a really poor job of using your words to communicate whatever it is that's on your mind. Are you having a different conversation than the rest of us?
You responded to me when I said I don't need a car in a city because of all the publicly available transportation. You said "That’s great that you have that but those options don’t exist in most of the US".
I said my point was that living in a city is more convenient than most of the country which is not a city.
You said "We’re talking about cities…" then went on to claim without a source that "Maybe 10% of those have useable public transport".
You doubled down and responded to "Public transportation is certainly an option in cities." with "Not in US cities."
And now you are claiming that there are cities where the closest bus stop is 30 miles away.
I don't know if a 30 mile wide city is even a thing that exists anywhere in the country let alone the fact that what you're claiming would likely mean the city is actually 61 miles wide for someone to be 30 miles from the nearest bus.
Perhaps if you could be more specific about the location you have in mind we could have an intelligent conversation.
If I wanted a recap of our conversation I would have asked ChatGPT. You're getting caught up in the details and intentionally ignoring the point.
I am asking you what your point is and you're throwing out ideas not based in reality.
The point that I made, that you are attempting to prove wrong, is that cities have readily available affordable transportation and if more people move to and work in cities they'd become even more robust and human-friendly. I'm suggesting that the lives of people living in the suburbs and working in cities (or pleading not to return to city office spaces), would be more affordable, flexibly, and convenient if they forwent private vehicle ownership in favor of living in a city and utilizing not-private transportation.
You seem to believe that cities do not have not-private transportation or a bus within thirty miles. That is a detail that's very relevant to the point of the conversation.
I don't know how I could possibly be more clear about my point. Most US cities do not have sufficient public transportation to consider as a realistic alternative. I've already given several examples from the city I personally live in.
I'm not attempting to prove anything. I'm just telling you that you're wrong. And clearly the vast majority agrees.
People do want to live and work in cities. That's why it's more expensive. Like 5-10x more expensive in my area. Selling my car ain't gonna cover that cost. Cities do nothing but build more and bigger highways that spread further away from town and mandate giant parking lots. You have it backwards.
Forget the thirty miles. Call it 10 miles. How are you gonna get there? Ride your bike? Great, add another hour to your commute, on top of the extra hour it takes the bus to get you into town instead of driving. Assuming you're not murdered on your way to the bus stop because the city lacks proper cycling infrastructure.
It would be helpful to know what cit you live in. I’m in Philadelphia. There’s literally a bus stop 12 steps from my front door. The next three closest stops are each a block away. I can not fathom a city that doesn’t have a bus stop more than a fifteen minute walk - let alone ten miles(!) away.
In my city, it’s substantially cheaper to live here than in the suburbs with a car. This certainly fluctuates across the country but 5-10x more is ridiculous. Maybe twice as much at most or three times as much in places like SF and NY. As I stated from the beginning, those are exceptions.
You have it backwards. It’s the suburbs that are the cause for so many highways. You can’t have suburbs without highways to get around. Cities are self contained. I have no need for a highway. Nor a parking lot. It’s the people who live in the suburbs who visit and work in the city who use parking lots. This is all apparent in your own statement; “selling a car… cities build more highways” is grossly illogical.
You are clearly hyper focused on people who live in a suburb and want to get to a city. You are ignoring the entire point of the conversation.
LOL this entire conversation seems to be entirely about your inability to fathom what it's like in other cities.
I used to live in the city and then moved out because rent is 4500 a month for a one bedroom and I don't feel like spending around 50k a year on housing for a small little rathole, especially when my salary cannot bear that
Also, now I'm not in the city, I have parks and trails and farms all right near me and I feel way healthier
Maybe I have to accept that I'm just super lucky to live in such a walkable and affordable city surrounded by so much open space and wildlife with better public transportation that we give it credit for. I mean, I spend less than $15k a year for 800 sq ft (plus large backyard) in of one of the more vibrant neighborhoods.
You're either rich as fuck or live in a dump you go out of every night to spend as little time there as possible and spend the rest of your money.
Fuck off, never going back to a city.
London is hell on earth. I live an hour away and rent my own 1-bed that I leave as little as possible. Life is amazing.
EDIT: pretty hotheaded comment, sorry I was insulting, but basically what it comes down to is that city housing is small and expensive in the UK, so it makes sense to leave to a suburb/town and I would never come back, maybe not so in the US.
Your experience is not universal.
I'm not rich as fuck nor do I live in a dump. I don't go out every night spending my money.
I can't speak to London since I've never been there, but living in Brooklyn has been better on every metric I care about than living in the suburbs. It's walkable. There's stuff I want to do. There's people.
If you're an anti social hermit who never leaves their house then sure I guess you can live wherever. But that sounds unhealthy.
American suburbs are extra hellish tbf. I don't own a car or even have a driver's license, my suburban area is a small walkable town with tons of restaurants, convenience stores and grocery stores, all on one street thats pedestrianized most of the day. It's not crowded and easy to avoid people.
I think housing in the US is generally better, but in the UK when I last lived in a city a family of three moved into an attic with a prison style shower I lived in for £1k PCM, except they paid £1300 for the privilege. I now rent my own 1-bed for less and can save money.
If anything honestly living in a city is actually factually unhealthy, people weren't meant to be around that many people, not to mention the pollution. Being a good amount of space away from any other people is the best feeling tbh.
Each to their own though I respect you for having a well formed take. Most city people like some friends who stayed after uni just deny the problems of cities, rather than simply state they care more about the advantages.
Your suburb sounds way nicer than the one I grew up in. It was like a 45 minute walk to the "main Street", with no sidewalks for most of it. A guy got hit by a car and killed at the intersection closest to the house when I was living there, too. Visiting any friends without a car impractical and/or "walk along the highway" dangerous.
A friend of mine lived in Beacon, NY for a year. It was kind of nice to visit. Walkable main street, restaurants and shops. Lots of space and nature. I don't think I'd want to live there full time though. Like it's cool that they have a Thai restaurant, but they have A Thai restaurant. There's like 20 that deliver to me here, and a handful I can walk to.
This is interesting and I wonder how much is just individual. I get sad in the suburbs when there's not a lot of people around. It feels lonely. The crowds here feel like a comfortable blanket. I like knowing that if I wreck my bike people will be there to help (that happened to me once, memorably)
I don't know about pollution. That probably varies a lot by specifics. My parents lived in a suburb really close to a highway, so that probably wasn't good for our air. New York I think is pretty good air quality because of its location and mass transit, where like Houston or LA I think have much worse smog problems.
It doesn’t sound like you grew up in the suburbs, man. It sounds like you grew up in a fairly small town.
That's just American suburbs, honestly. Many if not most subdvisions are designed to be pedestrian-hostile with the specific intent of excluding -- shall we say -- a certain class of person who doesn't have access to a car, and are thrown up wherever a builder managed to snag a contiguous chunk of greenfield site vaguely near a major city rather than being planned and positioned to for convenience to mass transit and amenities.
Heck, I live in a old streetcar suburb, that's basically in the city proper, and while it's only a ten minute walk to the nearest grocery store, I don't walk it because a) it's a fucking Walmart and I'm not giving them any of my money if I can help it and b) it'd require me to walk along two busy stroads, one way while lugging sacks of groceries. I'd prefer not to get mowed down by somebody coming off the highway who's not paying attention at the crosswalk if I can help it.
It must be area dependent in the US then, because I’ve lived in suburbs or small towns most of my life - the rest was spent on military bases overseas when I was a kid. The previous poster’s description of “no sidewalks” left me wondering just how far away from the city this suburb was. I mean, I could see specific subdivisions, I guess, but if it’s a true suburb of a major metropolitan area, I guess I always think of those as being thoroughly developed.
That’s been my experience, anyway. Not with public transport or anything, certainly, but fully paved and all that.
For reference, I live in a suburb of a midwestern city right now.
Wikipedia describes it as a suburb. It's within 40 miles of Manhattan. It might have been a little less than 40 minutes walking to parts of main Street. I checked on Google maps and asked it how long to walk from my parents house to the town library, which was pretty central.
There's a middle ground between a population living on top of one another and sprawling suburbs. I would strongly argue that humans are creatures that thrive on social interaction. Today's culture has twisted that on end driving us away from one another - THAT is unhealthy.
I do take the point that crowded environments sometimes aren't good for our physical health. Indoor plumbing and sewage systems solved that issue on one hand, but on the other hand we just lived through a pandemic that may or may not have been exasperated by close living quarters.
Maybe if we were less prone to be dicks to one another (because governments and corporations thrive on our anger, fear, and division) we wouldn't have been so polarized during the pandemic and had saved a few hundred thousand lives.
I have social interaction all the time, we're having it here right now on Lemmy, I also talk on VRC and occasionally visit ppl IRL. Social interaction with strangers though, especially forced as it is in cities, isn't supposed to be a thing, that's like why prisons are so horrible
WTF? I make an average salary and live in an average home. I do not go "out" all the time - that's financially irresponsible and I'm a grownass adult. You're not even making any sense. I have no way to relate to London but I have to imagine it's stupid expensive.
You must be middle class af then. My wage is like 80th percentile for the UK and while I could afford living in London it'd be in some studio dump or like a moldy room in a shed somewhere.
The UK is a different situation. You are experiencing the rigging of the market by people born 100 years ago more than most, though the rest will catch up.
Seems people are angry that you like a walkable city while they prefer to live in the suburbs. Or perhaps they are bitter that you get to live there and they don't.
I wasn't raised in the city. I grew up in a very Normal Rockwell painting suburb. I certainly had a different impression about city life as a kid before I moved here. What's strange is that people do seem to have this anger and bitterness. I don't know where it comes from. Fear of the unknown? Media bias?
In part, I think a large number of Americans believe in ultimate freedom and individuality in spite of all else - the country was basically founded (in my city) on this premise. So as soon as you suggest that people consider living in closer quarters and give up a personal vehicle in favor of relying on others for transportation, you're breaking the brainwashing they've gown up with. I just find it ironic because humans are a social species that benefit from communication and cooperation. For me, my brain breaks when people fight so strongly in favor of suburban and rural living. I get that technology can bridge this gap but there's still far more benefits to city life than anything else, in my opinion. I mean, I hate people but I could never live in isolation either.
I spent my childhood in a very rural area. I couldn’t wait to get away. I went to college and moved to a small-to-medium sized US city where I’ve now resided in the downtown area for over ten years.
The public transit is limited and the bus system is poor. Riding a bus to my job would take two hours each way, when driving takes 20 minutes. The jobs in my field are concentrated in the suburbs so I have no choice but to own a vehicle. Owning a vehicle in the city costs significantly more than in the suburbs or rural areas. I am unable to perform vehicle maintenance myself due to the unaffordability of homes here with garages or even off-street parking. My vehicle has been broken into multiple times. My insurance is higher and the cost to repair glass is a huge dent in one’s monthly income.
I have homeless people who jump the fence into a shared courtyard for my condominium and setup camp, leaving trash and other dangerous objects behind. The police come hours late if at all for these issues. My girlfriend gets catcalled and harassed by men who seem to spend all day propped against a building at the nearest street corner.
The most difficult thing for me to come to terms with is the fact that I’ve always dreamed of starting a business. My expertise is in physical industries. The kind where having a workshop or some land to keep equipment on goes a long way toward your success. Living in a city longterm would make that dream impossible.
Nothing in the city is free. It is impossible to exist here without each and every activity costing you something. Having everyone live in cities and use public transit is a wonderful thought, but it isn’t perfect.
I’m moving back to a rural area in a few years and building a house. It’ll be nice to walk outside, look up at the sky, have some peace and quiet, and just exist without being charged for it.
This is a really good point regarding money. At some point I stopped ever going outside in the city because it just costs money no matter what.
Philadelphia is one of the better cities I've ever experienced. For what its worth I lived there 4 years and never really had much of an issue. Enjoyed the spaces, got around fine, septa was totally adequate. I am originally from Baltimore though, and it is a VERY different situation. I now live in a rural setting, and would never consider a move to Baltimore under any circumstance. I don't know if its quite anger or resentment, but I'd wager most cities around the country are closer to Baltimore than Philly in terms of developed infrastructure and overall livability and most people are trained to filter the word "city" through the lens of their nearest city.
Transit has gotten such a bad reputation in the US that people consider it an imposition, a limitation, a constraint, when good transit is completely opposite. I loved the freedoms I got from livening in the city and having a subway pass! I just don’t have that anymore, now that I’m in a suburb.
This was Boston, which has pretty good transit for the US, but even then there were too many limitations that I eventually gave it up (that was before Uber, zipcar, rail trails, electric mobility, etc, so may be different now)
The solution is the revival of transit. Good transit. Even medium to smaller cities where trains aren’t appropriate can have good transit giving that freedom of not dealing with cars or traffic or parking. How do we make this happen?
I grew up in the city (beacon Hill in Boston) then ended up in the suburbs for a while, then back to the city again. Most of my suburban friends refused to come visit me, they tend to see "the city" as one thing, like they hear about rougher parts of town and think everywhere is like that... And they were afraid of the subway...