Just to correct since you brought Canada, have you visited Vancouver or Montreal ? Its anything North American suburb. Not all Canadian cities are suburban.
@@javieraravena3972 look at the state of American cities, especially Progressive ran cities. They are monuments to human suffering, crime and filth. The suburbs are The Refuge from these monstrosities. And they represent a way of living and thinking that's anathema to those geared towards a communal utopian fairytale
@@TheOpenSociety777 The state of American cities and American "society" as a whole are the result of 40+ years of anti-social and unsustainable neoliberal capitalist ideology. That's patently obvious to anybody paying even a modicum of attention. Regardless, the suburbs are living on borrowed time, and there's nothing you can do about it. The ongoing ecological collapse we're experiencing is about to give all of you spoiled Amerifat crybabies such a ferocious ass-kicking that it's not even funny... (I'm kidding, of course, it's _very_ funny... Enjoy your McBug burgers and Amazon pod homes $$$ :D:DD)
I've lived in the U.S. suburbia. There are several big challenges with the lifestyle, including kids being dependent on their parents to go anywhere and always having either me or my wife not drinking when going out.
As someone who lives in a big city that doesn’t require a car (Chicago), it always surprises me to see such big parking lots at bars in the suburbs. Seems like a really weird message.
@@NotJustBikesIf there was a poll on this, I suspect that most people would feel the opposite. Most people feel that the suburban environment is much more kid-friendly. In fact, I worry about most of the development efforts in my city (St. Louis.) They seem to be targeting young people without kids and retirees...but I don't see much effort to create "family friendly" environments.
@@stevebruns1833 He's not raising kids in a N. American city, he's raising them in urban Netherlands. Urban N. America can be as trashy as suburbia or worse
@@stuffums From what I understand, the American matchup between urban=poor and suburban=affluent is backwards in Europe. He didn't make it clear that he was talking from a European perspective. To American ears, it sounded ludicrously out-of-touch.
It's also important to understand the impact of alienation that comes from this dispersal into suburbs. Less interaction with your neighbors, less solidarity with them, less involvement in local government/community and organizing. The modern suburb help kill US labor movement.
@@Darknight73457 you are so wrong on this that's it's basically clear you didn't think it thru. Which is ok, it's easy to be reactionary in a UA-cam comment. You are mixing up "real" solidarity with something else. American cities are literally nightmare traps where it's easy to never interact with another human face to face. Our world is one of other cars and drive thru menus. Pull together data on population density, public transit, public space, you'll find strong corolatations with union membership. I get it, you want to start shit on UA-cam comments, I hope you find a more rewarding use of your time. Unsub to those conservative channels, go spend some cash on onlyfans vs UA-cam foot pages, you'll feel better.
You touched on a very interesting point: green space. People love to talk about how modern-style neighborhoods and buildings are more nature-friendly. As if a useless lawn and a dozen bushes could prevent global warming. Or worse: as if they compensated the gas emissions of hundreds of SUVs driving miles a day just to get groceries.
Also, often these green spaces are mono-culture waste lands. I noticed the difference when walking along a wild meadow in my neighbourhood. Domestic flowers etc. were sown there ten years ago. In the beginning not much happened, but now, ~ 15 years later, I can identify at least twenty different plant species, as compared to less than five on a close-by typical suburb meadow. Thus: green space isn't always quality space.
@@wenkeli1409 If you mow the grass short every week, your lawn dries out with a little sun and becomes a desert. You can change that by cutting the grass longer (move the blades up) and only cut it once a month, and only half the patch in different patterns. This way you'll get a lawn with grass in different heights, your lot will hold moisture better, you'll enable butterflies to develop, it attrackts more insects, thus more birds. My dad used to water his roses every day. I don't need to water them now, and we've had record dry years.
''green space'' isn't green space. Lawns are ecologically speaking as biodiverse as a desert. No matter if you leave the grass a bit longer. Only way to improve biodiversity is to allow a greater diversity of species, like lawn flowers, weeds and such. But even then nothing compares to letting patches of lawn just grow wild with meadow plants...
Another thing that I want to add, and I'm not sure if you are going to touch on it later on in this series or on other videos on your channel, is the fact that walkable urban design allows disabled people to exist in a community My husband became disabled in 2019, and had to retire from his job due to his disability and lost his ability to drive because even here in the heart of American automotive culture, they don't let you drive if you have seizures. Not being able to drive has been an absolute nightmare for him because most of our town is not accessible on foot, and it limits my daily activities as well. For example, I cannot take a job where I may have to travel regularly because I cannot afford to be away from home overnight and leave my husband and young child without access to a vehicle in the event of an emergency. We require far more support from family and friends just so that they do not wind up being effectively stranded at home if I do have to be away for any amount of time Additionally, our city puts off all sidewalk maintenance onto individual property owners, and the only enforcement for having a dangerously damaged or snow-covered sidewalk comes in the form of a citation when someone calls the city to complain about a specific property, so much of sidewalks in our residential neighborhoods, especially older neighborhoods, is wildly out of ADA compliance and unsafe under the best of circumstances for someone who has mobility impairments that require use of a mobility aide and/or those with young children in strollers It's just amazing how much freedom we really have to pursue life, liberty, and happiness here in America (sarcasm)
my grandmother's neighborhood was demolished and they built a Costco and a Distillery over it, filled with empty parking space. Modern suburbia truly is a cancer on today's cities
In my town they completely demolish a motel and a good, authentic, local, and family-owned Mexican restaurant in favor of building another gas station. My town already has a lot of gas stations, so I don't know why they felt the need to build another one. I really miss that restaurant (╯︵╰,)
@@kittykittybangbang9367 I'm surprised they didn't replace it with a Mattress World, a dollar store, or some auto-body shop since those businesses love spreading around suburbs like a weed.
It saddens me when I see a photo of a main street of a small town and then if that town was near enough to be absorbed into a city's suburbs that main street gets demolished and replaced with a stroad with no pavements and big box stores. In the UK when a city expands into a village many of the original village buildings are kept though they might be refurbished with shop fronts or left as cottages with the shops built nearby.
Having a car where I live is completely mandatory. Without one you are completely unable to function as a human being, it's incredible. That is just the culture here, everything is too far apart and too sparsely populated for public transport to be viable, and no one wants to open more stores in areas that only house a few thousand people. I'd be interested if someone found a way to break the habit of mandatory drivability in the future.
This. I didn't think it was a problem until I got to college. My college is in downtown. But driving 45 minutes to and from the city for 4 days a week is draining. I was used to the idea that adults drive. Then, I realized it was not completely for me because driving for more than 45 minutes to work or school is miserable and stressful to me (driving itself is not stressful but dealing with traffic is because people don't know how to drive apparently). I am able to commute via public transport but American's public transport is not completely reliable. And I wish it did. Having a simple life is a dream now.
@@xStarstargirlx I went to HS in Melbourne's CBD and then moved to a 'small city' that absolutely requires me to have a car just to do errands. It wasn't until I came across this channel that I realised i was missing the walkability
where I live kind of too, when I came to the states as a teenager, I was disappointed how reliable one has to be on a car , and how you cant walk to anything , and how much more boring it is in the suburbs
I have a battery-electric bicycle. I lost one spoke on the rear hub, and the company that made the bike doesn't have parts. So, if I want to replace that one spoke, I have to drive 35 miles to a shop that custom makes them! So, in spite of having the battery-electric bicycle, I still have to depend on my car.
Reminds me of tales about the old west - where a horse was a necessity in getting around, and horse thieves were severely punished. Yet at the very same time, people living in eastern cities had other ways of travel (starting in the late 19th century) even inter-urban....by electric tram. That was an era when so-called suburbs were referred to as 'streetcar.' Population density is what makes mass transit work. It is only financially viable when people live close together, relatively speaking. Could be that ultimately what breaks the habit of mandatory drivability in the future - is affordability.
As a young person I always dreamed of moving to the US based on all the things I would see on TV and films (which now I see are reflective of either the stunning natural landscapes of America, the charming very small New England-like towns or the vibrant cities like New York but completely unreflective of the sprawling, sterile, car-dependent, boring swaths of urban America more generally). Now as an adult I am ever more grateful that I don't live in America and part of me is pained to say that. I'm also starting to understand the social problems that seem to plague the modern United States, from mass shootings to strange religious and political cults: living in that car dominated, monotonous sprawl has to do something unpleasant to the psyche of a nation.
What I forgot to add was that what gives me hope is that in my experience the people of the US (and Canada) are big-hearted, generous, kind and creative and so one day when the obstacles of inertia and the ideological blinkers are overcome, they will be well placed, better placed even than many other societies, to turn these problems around and create places that are truly good for people and the natural environment too.
2:07 I know that feeling, but in reverse. I've never seen anything like a suburban place, I lived my entire life in France and I must tell you : I really don't understand how can people in USA/Canada can live in such places where you need to take your car to buy food, nor can I understand how anyone could have thought it could be a good idea to so-drastically separate the living place from the commercial place.
@@NorthernSeaWitch Yep, the US had a lot of railroads and wanted to build a lot of railways back when it 1st began but then car company started to lobby and thus giving the US a big problem
When I roadtripped the US, as soon as I did not have a hotel/hostel/bnb in a city centre there was nothing within walking distance. Wanted to eat? Car ride. Shopping? Car ride. Groceries? Car ride. If you drive for 6-8 hours to your new destination the last thing you want is another 15 minutes to get some food after you checked in. And all suburbs were dead of life. Nothing to see, nothing to do.
@@sys-administrator Actually Dutch cities will also have places to eat in walking distance, even outside the city center. Because we do zone in retail and mixed use in mostly residential areas. We create small to large 'malls' (buurtwinkelcentrum) and places for at least a cafetaria (snackbar) and a pizzeria or kebab place in every new development larger than a few football field. So a new area for 3.000 homes would also have a supermarket and some shops and places for food and drinks in it, in walking or cycling distance. And usually some high rise near those services with bus or tram connections to the city center, and lower density housing further away fromd the services area. The mono-functional zoning of North america was in this channel before. It looks like an awful plan.
"their depressingly, soul crushingly, dystopian car-dependant suburbs" "not just because these suburbs are ugly, devoid of life and soul crushingly sterile" Sir, you have no chills 😂
@@JohnSmith-cx8co "Undermines the message." here is the problem: Strong Towns made this exact video. Like basically the same content. It's the one I link to in the video. It has a serious tone and no joking around or bashing the suburbs. It had just over 5K views in the past *4 years.* This video had more views than that within the first hour. I made this video to get the word out about Strong Town's research. Which of these two videos will do that best? The straight-up factual one that Strong Towns released four years ago, or this one that "undermines the message" with jabs at the suburbs? I would be happy to put out straight factual content without the silliness, but the fact is, nobody would watch it. Will I turn away some people by making fun of the suburbs? Absolutely. But I will ultimately draw a larger audience, and get the message out to more people. So in the end, it's more effective this way. People can always share the Strong Towns version with friends in suburbia if they want to anyway. And besides, car-dependant suburbia is shit and the comments are well-deserved. If that's a problem, then perhaps these suburbs should stop sucking so much?
It's so weird to realize how impractical suburban development in the USA is. As a non-American consuming tons of American Media growing up, i've always been fascinated by American Suburbs. The cul de sacs, the open spaces, the large driveways, the white picket fences and frontyard gardens. I used to find them so beautiful growning up in a place where there's nothing like it. But now i'm actually not into it anymore. As you said, they're just... bland. And Jesus Christ, having a car is a good thing when it's NOT a necessity, but a way to spoil yourself.
There are nice ones that grew organically and as a result have things around them. The issue are ones that are manufactured due to people wanting/needing to have access to a major city and not being able to afford it. They have nothing but houses for 10-15 minutes of driving.
"It's only downhill from here" when showing the closed Taco Bell (or whatever it was) is even an understatement - because unlike these "jucky old buildings" down the road, the fast food restaurant literally can't be anything BUT a fast food restaurant. If the spot isn't good enough anymore, taxable value isn't 40% of the other lot - it's 0%.
@@NotJustBikes My brother's girlfriend is from the states. It was an eye-opening experience to take her shopping in our european city. At first she was like "THAT'S what you call a mall? how small is this town?" when we went to a shopping centre for the first time. But then followed the almost childish amazement of walking through the town around that shopping centre and all the shops and the buzzing athmosphere in a pedestrian-only zone. I mean, it certainly helped that it was approaching christmas back then and the town was full of decorations, but she actually said: "The entire city feels like a christmas village. That is so cool."
@@NotJustBikes This is something I've been thinking about with some of my town's local strip malls. Smaller units kinda come and go, but the big boxes are a tall order. Two big boxes are former grocery stores (the area has, or had, a lot of those for our population for some reason) - and they're so large the only thing you're putting in there is another grocery store. This doesn't seem viable because the grocer that was there before didn't make it for some reason that the new one will probably not really avoid either. The rest are restaurants and general retailers, which aren't doing so hot either. I guess Spirit helped plug two of them for a little while, at least. Plus, they keep building new stripmalls and leaving the old ones to kinda waste away, just as you said. Plenty of empty units in the strips right near me, but no, they built a brand new one in between the ones I live near and another older strip mall that also has empty units. And before that said new one filled every store, they went and built another (though they thankfully tore down another old crumbling one old one before building it) and even that hasn't filled all its units over the last 4 years or so. On the bright side, this stretch of development seems denser than a lot of other sprawling hells, so I guess I can count my blessings there.
@@ME-hm7zm They possibly build that new one, because the developer makes money this way. They only build the stuff and deliver it turnkey to the people who will manage the place. So they've made their money and now they're grasshopping to another place. They don't care about the long term state of a property, because they don't need to, it's no longer their problem.
@@peterslegers6121 Very probable, yeah. On the upside, the newest strip mall is strictly more useful than the old one, so we lucked out in that specific way (it not only replaced a partially unused strip, but also incorporated what was a decrepit and largely abandoned trailer park). It also helped fuel some road development (county doesn't do new roads, just manages them), which included some really nice bike lanes (for the US anyways).
It boggled my mind when I first went to the US and tried to.. go somewhere. People don't walk to places. Doesn't matter from where to where, people don't walk (except maybe in the Downtown which is usually the oldest neighborhood of the city). This video series explains why is that and why I had a hard time finding a coffee shop nearby on foot..
I used to design cities in cities: skylines the way I had always seen them living in america, after watching these video I found that not only did my city do way better financially, it also had way less traffic, and most of that was from work and service vehicles
I came here for dutch city planning stuff (mostly to improve my cities in cities skylines). I stayed because you ranting about north american city "design" is extraordinarily entertaining.
@@alexanderosullivan9764 except that there's a theme in the vanilla game called "European" filled with European buildings. There are certain maps that use that set of buildings by default.
@@LilliD3 they look European, that's enough for me. Of course, they aren't mixed use, that's a flaw of the game and affects the american buildings as well
@@namenamename390 have you been to Europe? They don't really look european coming from a european living in Europe. They are better than the regular buildings, but not good enough
To explain the 'funny-tasting lettuce' thing: I guess it's an American thing, but lettuce here in the states can sometimes be 'washed' with a food-safe rinse. The rinse, if not fully removed, can leave the lettuce slightly more bitter or chemical-y than usual. The food packaging plants don't really bother too well with rinsing the lettuce (a cost-cutting measure) and do the bare minimum for food safety standards wherever they can get away with it (again, for cost-cutting). Good, fresh places do a decent job of rinsing off the lettuce in-house before serving it to customers, but cheaper places just pull it from the bulk packaging and throw it in a metal tub until a customer orders something with lettuce in it. Other vegetables can receive the same treatment, but lettuce is one of the most noticeable because a) it's usually served raw, and b) lettuce doesn't have much flavor on its own anyway (so the bitterness of the food-safe rinse stands out against the 'nothing flavor' of lettuce). Oh, by the way, that cost-cutting stuff is more for the big-heads' paychecks rather than to make it more affordable for everyone or pay their workers a better wage.
Its almost culturally ingrained in us in the US to want a sort of "frontier" lifestyle where you have your own land and get to travel into town once a week to pick up supplies. The frontier lifestyle is essentialy where the american dream came from.
I thing that the Dutch suburbs were lucky to be erected when the esteem of public transport had just passed its lowest point. So, at least, cities like Houten, Heerhugowaard and (from scratch) Almere were planned along railroads, but with the exception of (at least) Almere-Haven (planned around a circular bus route), they definitely look car-centric to me. (Keyword"Vinex", but I'm speaking from my own memory and experience.) A more recent development, especially in the re-development of sections inside cities, may be the planning of provisions (please substitute the appropriate term for "voorzieningen") around stations. A good example may be the station area of Zaandam, but the metro station of Rotterdam Zuidplein may be an earlier example. The area of metro station Amsterdam Noord is under re-development to that view.
@@irasthewarrior I mean it makes sense cause there’s only a footpath on one side of the road and cars fly by at 60 kph infront of my house so everyone only drives everywhere my city feels lifeless even though there’s a lot of people in it :(
There’s also a financial impact on the personal finances of the people using those blocks too. One block allows for more business owners with middle class incomes, while the other only has room for a few minimum wage jobs.
"Depressingly soul crussing, sterile, ugly, car dependent, dystopian..." "filled with fast food..." "these big box suburbs are actually making communities poorer..." Yup sounds like the entire Dallas Ft Worth metroplex...👍
For anyone wondering, this is what most of Australia is like too. People move to Melbourne to try to get away from it but we almost all wind up in the suburbs eventually 😭🥲
@@alexwilder8315 that's where I live still. Probably the only suburb in Melbourne where everything is walkable and with some rudimentary bicycle infrastructure, though there's no such thing as good bicycle infrastructure in Melbourne. As soon as you're on a bicycle here, you're a cyclist.
@@PostImperfect anything outside of St Kilda in the SE and Fitzroy on the North circle and you need to drive to the shops cafes, and don't get me started on the lack of protected bicycle lanes. Your best metric of walkability in the area is wether you can live here without a car.
I lived in Brooklyn for 7 years in my late 30’s early 40’s after being born/raised in the New Jersey suburbs. I loved that I could walk or take public transit for virtually all my needs. Why did I leave? Couldn’t afford to buy a house/condo so I moved back to the suburbs. Now I miss the neighborhood, but not the crappy, overpriced apartment.
Something this video doesn't touch upon is that yes, suburbs may be uglier and car centric, but the expirement succeeded for the average citizen, as can be seen with most Americans living in suburbs. I currently live in a city but the rent price I pay is quite exorbanently high. The convince of not having to use a car does not outweigh the cost of a car.
@@Kajamazvideos Yes, but if more investment were made in downtowns instead of suburbs, there would be a greater supply of (expanded) downtown housing and thus it would cost less....
I currently live in Manhattan, a few feet away from Gracie Mansion, paying roughly a third of my salary on rent of a one bedroom apartment with a wonderful back yard. I have relatively few other expenses, so I have healthy savings and investments. I love walking to work, and I entertain A LOT. I have a dog, and there’s nothing better than these brisk fall days when I get together with friends to take our dogs to Central Park, or walk over to Randall’s Island where they can swim in the river and run through the woods. And the ferry system is such a relaxing way to get to the other boroughs. I grew up in the suburbs, then as an adult lived in different towns and cities in France and Italy. I loved how walkable they all were. Coming back to the States, I was glad to get a car and live in the suburbs of Orlando, Fl - until I wasn’t. Yes I did have a lot more space, but the driving everywhere got annoying. Being able to walk everywhere seems a lot more natural to me. I know a lot of people left the city during the pandemic, but I never considered it for a second. I’ll never live in the suburbs again.
@@alleghanyonce I don’t think it’s about the lettuce itself, but America is known for the low quality of their fast food, I think that’s the stereotype they are referring to. I don’t buy fast food that often but I have had a few experiences with no so fresh lettuce in my burgers.
Some of my biggest problems with the suburbs are just because of how backwards the goals seem to be. Youd think a benefit of a suburb would be to walk to bike, yet most of them have small streets with 1/2 of the residents parking their cars on the street when their driveway is empty. The people tend to be unhealthy and just generally rude/superior, especially if you dont put a lot of work into your yard. Suburbia is supposed to be a sign of success but the people in them dont reflect it. At least in my experience.
My daughter was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When she was nine years old, we moved to the US and stayed at first with my brother. On her first day, she looked out of the window of the suburban home and said, "Where are the people?" We now live in Istanbul, Turkiye in a very walkable neighborhood.
From what I heard about the US, in April 60% of small businesses in the US said they would not last until October and would need to permanently close. I wanted to say: not all of them, but f-ing 60% is a lot !
@@autohmae Small businesses close every single day for a variety of reasons. External impacts like COVID give dying businesses a mortal blow. Even without COVID, about 96 percent of small businesses (1-99 employees) that enter the marketplace survive for one full year, 85 percent survive for three years and 70 percent survive for five years (Key Small Business Statistics). PPP loans were supposed to cover people's prior 6 months revenues and keep people employed. If those were already low and you were projected to close down your business anyway, COVID wasn't the mainf factor (nor did it help). It sucks, but small businesses are inherently risky and the life and death cycle of them is what sustains competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Honestly I’ve always wondered why my town is so depressing and has nothing to do. Finally some answers, this all lined up with what I’ve observed in my life.
I just read Strong Towns after your first video and it was a complete wake-up call. I knew before reading it that I preferred walkable cities, but I didn't realize how _fundamentally_ we have screwed up city development in the US. Our suburbs have no where to go but down.
Now read the Strong Towns articles about Detroit and you'll be able to see the future of your town as well, if things keep going as they are. 😱 www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/4/we-are-all-detroit-2019
you can keep your walkable cities, I'll stick with my car and bike-friendly and much less crowded suburbs, though even there slowly becoming to crowed these days it seems
@@sirpieman300 That's not the point. The point is that these "suburbs" are not sustainable in the long run, and many have gone bankrupt because the revenue they bring is not enough to cover infrastructure and service costs.
Okay, so when is the big fall then? when is our big collapse? "American cities are ready to crumble!! American suburbs are crumbling!., " all i see are more being built, developed, and bought into.
This video is really interesting, and really strikes a point. However I'd like to emphasize that not all of Europe is perfect. For instance, in my country (France), the same model of suburbs has expanded over the years, leading to the problems expressed in this video. Many of the people taking part in the yellow vest riots in 2019 were suburbans whose lifestyles have been decaying over the last decades.
France has got a good balance between houses and big buildings of flats, I think. Your main problem is that all your architecture (with the exception of bretagne) follows the same parisian model.
In a way it seems almost directly proportional to the size of the country, at least in Europe. I know we definitely have that in Sweden as well, especially on the outskirts of wealthy cities.
Il y a des zones commerciales comme celle ci mais elles sont loins d'être la majorité. Et puis surtout les zones résidentielles sont quand même rarement aussi étendu et dépourvu de batiment.
I've recently come from a city in Europe where I had never owned a car for 10 years to California where my first year of commuting felt like I was living in the car. Great video! Subscribing, yo!
These suburbs are like what desertification is to forests but for cities. They create massive swaths of land that you have no reason to visit unless you are going to your house or someone who know. They are less productive as mentioned in this video and they suck out funds via big box stores, the only type of store that can survive this environment.
But that is exactly where I would want to live. Why would I want you, or indeed anyone else who doesn't live in my neighbourhood, or at least someone visiting someone who does, to be wandering around making noise and generally cluttering up the neighbourhood needlessly? Everyplace should be someplace nobody would go unless they lived there
@Func the Fucc I believe that Rural life is the best life and that the closer a person lives to a population center the more miserable they are. Cities are a zit on the face of the earth
Mark Hadley not everyone is you. I grew up in an exurban/semi rural area and mostly hated it. I liked being surrounded by nature, but hated the ugly endless parking lots of what passed for “town”, the extreme car dependency, having to beg my parents for a ride to do literally anything. I didn’t feel like I lived in a real place as much as a house in it’s own dimension with soulless stores locked off in another only accessible by car. Now I live in a major European city and I vastly prefer it in basically every way. Don’t assume everything prefers the same things you do.
Colonel Green Colonel Green sure and those places should exist too. But in most of America people have basically no choice but to live in those endless suburbs unless they’re capable of affording the scarce amounts of ridiculously expensive housing in dense walkable neighborhoods. I was mainly replying to that guy’s assertion that rural living is the only right way of living. It just comes down to a trade off. If you want to sacrifice the ability to walk places and to enjoy the vibrancy of a city for quiet and space, that’s fine. But don’t decide that’s the only correct way of living.
@@markhadley1545 Most people that live in an area aren't likely to go out of their way to go to new stores once they have their chosen spots to shop at. Tourism, no matter how much it's hated, is often needed, because these are people wanting to experience something new and will shop off the beaten path, providing the much needed income for niche stores. Why do you think so many states here in the U.S. were breaking the CDC guidelines well before they should've, just to open back up again? Tourism. They need the money.
As a kid in the ATL suburbs, one of my best friends HATED living down here after moving down from NYC cause he was used to being able to walk places and not need a parent to drive him around everywhere and actually having things to do
My parents were in their mid 30s when we all emigrated to Canada in 1955 and I know for a fact that much of my mother’s homesickness for Haarlem and her childhood cities of Sneek and Hindeloope was because of the lack of gezelligheid in our cities here.
Not to mention how overwhelmingly these suburban "parking lot plains" favor corporate chains as tenants. They demand long-term leases and the insurance is nearly impossible for a small boutique business to be able to afford as overhead.
And we started to do this shit in Germany too. But worse, car centric cities are also affecting regular inner city residential districts. In the past we had a lot more stores in the ground floor too, right in the middle of residential buildings. They ranged from supermarkets, over cafes, to backer's and butchers, and you could just get a lot of daily produce or something to eat nearby. Now you have to move further to the next bigger supermarket (of course with its own parking lot), or you have to drive / walk to the inner city where all kinds of stores are in one spot (with a lot of useless ones, like mobile phone stores, which just block potentially useful spots), but those inner city parts are also not very nice to stay in because they are just walkways with stores on the left and right. Kinda like a big mega store, but on the outdoors, instead of having more recreational use within them. All the little stores that were dotted around eventually died, because the more car centric a city became, the more people rather went to the bigger stores or inner cities instead, and every other part, including the residential areas became sort of a no mans land, aside from the few poor pedestrians without a car (Hi!). This whole issue is actually an important topic for the climate debate too, especially for the US where car traffic makes up for such a large amount of their emissions. They really need to redesign their cities to be less car centric overall, so that people are also okay with taking other forms of transport, or maybe even just walk the distance.
The town in the Netherlands I life in the city center shops many are empty and some 5 to10 years ago they put up Mediamarkt, Ikea, etc. on the city border near the highway. I'm still not sure if that brought in more visitors from other regions and thus helped the down town to get new business or if it meant people didn't go into town anymore. Probably a bit of both. The Internet it the down town's biggest competitor I think.
Wait did you mean to say "improv" or "improve"? Because those are two different terms that could work equally well. :) Don't change it now because you'll lose the heart on your comment, though.
@@shrike6259 Totally! And they spend $$$ on coffee, bakeries and restaurants. So the whole town improves. This happened in Edmonton. The city got a little better after legalization, but I wouldn't go back there on a vacation.
As someone who grew up in New England (actually from the Brattleboro area, so I was super excited to see a street I know pop up in one of these videos), I could never quite put my finger on why the vast, flat, spread out strip mall approach to urban design always rubbed me wrong. I'm enjoying the way these videos pull on those threads.
Watching these videos as an American who is currently living in a suburb makes me sad and frustrated. I hope things change here but it’s not going to happen anytime soon
Ya, where I'm at in the suburbs outside of Seattle, I can see new developments all over the place to make more mixed use walkable areas, but they are only just starting this in the last 5 to 10 years. The Netherlands started in the 1970's, so they are at least 4 decades ahead of us. There's still so much pent up demand for mixed use housing that any new apartments that get built are going to be astronomically expensive for quite some time. It's funny how I read so many comments about Amsterdam being so expensive, but I look at it and I see how cheap it is. I can even find a place that's 2/3 the price of the cheapest studio apartments in Seattle, but they have nicer bathrooms and an actual private kitchen.
@Connor Nielsen It is not COVID 19 but the fact that the USA closed the borders for European immigrants and European countries closed the borders to USA immigrants, and both to many others as well. COVID 19 does not help but we hope that it will be temporarily.
Impeccably presented! "Hartelijk dank!" Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in Palo Alto, California in the '60s and '70s. In 1971, I returned for the first time to the Netherlands after immigrating to the US in 1957. The experience enlightened and inspired me. I realised that I was very much Dutch, and I decided at 15 that I would return to live. In 2019, I retired, and left the UK (!) where I lived for 31 years. I now live in delightful Middelburg with its striking town centre and charming, mesmerising neighbourhoods. Although the Dutch in the last 50 years have replicated some of the worst American practices, their city centres teem with joyful shops, cafés, restaurants, and housing. I adore living here. I feel... alive and euphoric! Frankly, when I was a youngster, I found the towns and cities in the US effectively uninhabitable because they lacked character, charm, and walkability. Ubiquitous six lane roads and motorways turned me off. There was nothing to look at and enjoy. Middelburg, in that regard, is paradise. Am I in heaven?
Places that look the same as everywhere, do lack _emotional anchorpoints_ as I call them. You need those special places where you can be at ease and in awe, in order to care for the area you live in. Happily my region has plenty historical buildings and enjoyable squares or even corners that fulfill this simple human need.
I lived in Dublin, Ireland for over 10 years in several neighbourhoods and in Ireland each neighbourhood has what they call a "main street". The main street is within walking distance and each main street has tipically a butchers, hair sallon, convenience store, liquor store, a bank, 1 or 2 restaurants and 1 or 2 pubs, some main streets have also a hardware store and the great majority are family businesses so you know the money will stay within the community.
I hate my life here in Canada. the housing market is seriously so messed up, everything is so expensive, there's no hope that i'll ever have a house and get ahead like my parents did, and it makes me so depressed :(
Great video! I wish more towns would act on this. My town did a similar study, came to the exact same conclusion, wrote solutions into their master plan and.... brought in more suburban development
The lettuce comment intrigued me and my mind wandered off. I had to watch the video a second time. Why did she write that comment. Has she never eaten or tasted lettuce? Has lettuce a bad name in US? Are food standards so low in US that lettuce tastes unfamiliar? Isn’t she used to eat vegetables and was this her first time ever? Or did she decide to eat healthier from now on, so she didn’t pick out put aside the lettuce from the burrito or taco? Or did she just write it so someone like me would wonder about it? I’m still intrigued.
This is why I had to include it when I found the review. Why would lettuce not tasting funny even be an attribute worth mentioning? WHY, CYNTHIA, WHY?!
My go to at taco johns in the taco burger with no lettuce. In my opinion the lettuce just takes away taste. Doesn't taste funny necessarily but it does taste better without
My fiancé and I recently moved to a small town where I can walk to the little family owned grocery to the bank to the post office to the home cooking restaurant and it feels so wildly different than when we lived in an apartment on the edge of the city....
Live in a small town in the US. 30 minute drive to major city. It's a massively different sense of community. It's all local business and everyone knows each other. We have like 3 restaurants and 1 bar, so everybody goes to the same places waves hello. There are many places like this in the US, but if your focus is on being close to a major city versus finding a nice town near one, you will undoubtedly find the soulless suburbs here
I don't suspect that Brainerd is any worse than any other American city of a similar size. Its downtown actually looks reasonably nice, too. Better than most of the downtown area of my hometown.
When I worked in Minnesota three years ago I took care of a kid from Brainerd, he was a real troublemaker XD I hope he has grown up, cause he was 13 yo.
No discussion of this is complete without a history of how American Auto companies intentionally pushed laws and policies that created the suburbs specifically to sell more cars.
I never understood why in US, they don't allow commercial properties mixed with residential. When living abroad, I loved the fact that I can walk to corner store to grab whatever I need. At the least, every corner of the block should be multi usage property.
@@AA_cowgomoo It's got nothing to do with math. The name refers to Euclid vs Ohio which was a case that determined it was legal for the government to tell you what you can/cannot do with your property.
Let’s not forget about the post-1980s American maxim of “taxation is theft,” wherein the whole point of urban development is to starve municipalities and enrich a select few development interests.
Yeah, when you're actively bulldozing things and building developments that bring in *less* tax revenue than what you bulldozed, it definitely does not help that your taxes are already way too low as it is. But part of the problem is that the US has built so many sprawling infrastructure miles per person that the tax rate would have to be insanely high to cover it all - even if Americans *didn't* think "tax" was a four-letter word.
@@NotJustBikes were the buildings that they bulldozed empty? or was it basically a carbon copy of the full lot to the left and they booted the businesses out?
A lot of dutch people also think “taxation is theft,” And apparently think that roads are some kind of plants, and if there are holes in the road, it closes at night
@@JacobBax I think this particular thought disease was invented and transmitted by America, starting in the 1980s. Many of us feel it's our patriotic duty to pay our taxes.
@Jacob Bax @Bill Scurry Seeing the nice bridges and roads BicycleDutch shows us every week, I don't mind paying taxes. I fully understand it takes money to live in a nice environment, to have good healthcare, and to have a warm bed even when you didn't work the last 3 years. And the dutch AOW is of a whole other level than 'social security' in the USA. So yes, it takes money to have all these goodies. You may call them taxes, it's just a name for the money needed to live a good life, collectively. (Or is this socialism already ?)
There are some movements afoot to change this. In metro Atlanta, there are mixed use developments being built. The goal is to establish live/work/play communities. The movement is slow to catch on though. Even in my county in the outskirts of the metro there has been a boom in new housing along with commercial development.
Your right, although this comes with another issue: these mixed developments are being built in class and racially stratified parts of town, where only the (white) middle class and rich can afford them. Atlanta in particular is being hard hit by racial and class based gentrification. There's also areas in Florida being built to adhere to the same concept, but they are either strictly for seniors and/or middle to upper class families. For older downtown areas that do happen to allow travel by foot, they are slowly being gentrified as the poor and routinely BIPOC are pushed, ironically enough, to the suburbs or areas with less transportation access. Honestly, it's all a giant clusterfuck that won't be improved if even our efforts to improve them fall along racial and class lines.
@@intenebrisveritas You do realize white is a color, right? You act like we are subhuman while acting like anyone non-white is a god among us. You racist leftietards are strange cult.
Atlanta in general is spared the fate of "we'll have to tear down what's here to start over again" that you'll see in somewhere like Houston because it's so sparsely developed. And I say that as an Atlantan. Lots of room to grow inwards, if the economic opportunities are there.
I've done construction oversight work near the Brainerd example. That Taco John's gave me an upset tummy. It's really neat to have such a familiar example of this. When I went to school for civil engineering, I was taught hyper car centric designs were not only the right choice but the only choice. I hope soon that this changes, but I fear for the future at this point. Thanks for making cool videos.
Thanks for this video. Whenever I tell my parents that America is a bit of a wasteland they say I sound like a euro snob so I showed them this series to prove them wrong. So I want to say thank you!
What did you're parents said after watching these video's? Many years ago, I learned that my parents had been thinking about moving to the US. Since UA-cam, I love them more than ever, that it has remained just thinking.
@@hankleupen2775 I live in the netherlands. In a city of 35.000 and I have 3 big groserie stores with in a 10 minutes bike ride, and a more expancive one in a 5 minute walk. And after 65 years this is also a boring place, but to some people it looks like a fairytale. Is my english that bad :-)) ?
Jacob Bax that is a really good point, however other things like how the Netherlands makes energy has me intrigued, and it would shock everyone if the us did something like that
As a native of a major east coast city, I find it strange whenever I visit my out of town friends. The fact that you simply don't have personhood without a car is alien as hell to me. Even though I have no familiarity with how infrastructure works, I just didn't understand how a place can operate like that. Now watching this video, it's amazing to find that they're not commercially viable, and in a strange way knowing this makes my gut feeling about them feel vindicated.
Love your videos. However, I'm a bit concerned that viewers may end up believing that all (western) European cities are urban planning utopia. In my limited experience in Europe, it seems that many historical town centres been emptied out, gentrified and globalized to appeal to the rich and to tourists (pre-covid). Neither is Europe immune to the trend towards suburbanization.
There’s a difference between suburbanization and gentrification, but they both have a similar end result. One point not really touched on in the video is aside from tax value per acre, the revenue remaining in the immediate community is still much higher for the old style of planning. People own those shops. They love around the corner. They shop at the other shops and feed their families from the money they make. While suburbanization removes that almost entirely, so does gentrification. Displacing the current population by inflating the revenue value required for that quality of life is really not much different than local money going into big corporate pockets. Yuppies move their herbal coffee shop into the decrepit storefront that used to be a Dominican restaurant, using their parents’ money up front, and proceed to not reinvest that money into their immediate community, thus raising the value that actual locals need to produce in order to stay afloat. If your only coffee shop in your neighborhood is charging $10 for a cup of coffee, and that owner isn’t buying the product or service you sell, you’ve been gentrified. I’ve watched it happen to New York, and your comment makes me very sad to learn it’s happening in Europe as well. I figured it was only an American issue.
If Europe's also trending the same way, there could be rooms for potential in such an experiment. There are disadvantages in a city after all like all types of things. As this channel said, it's only been several decades of its development, the "proven" city development that was made for countless years may have been like that in its infancy. In my observation, the current design of suburbs do look like it has major flaws, but then, are we gonna just abandon it altogether without trying to make it better in the future? Why did suburbs existed in the first place, bc we can
Good point. I’m from the Netherlands and in big cities there is a trend of some old neighbourhoods being gentrified, the original residents being forced to move out of their social housing to areas further away. It’s a big issue.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS. LITERALLY EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS. I'm literally going to quote this video when I sit down with my councillor here in Thunder Bay next week...
Every town and city in the US and Canada needs to read and understand Strong Towns. We can still have suburbs, but we need to build them properly, so that future generations can benefit from them as well, and we don't saddle them with debt. Thunder Bay has good "bones": it needs to build on the productive places it already has.
@@NotJustBikes Thunder Bay has two strong downtowns that don't have to change - there is just a lot of quick fill inbetween that I think should be replaced with mid-density urban spaces before the city expands its footprint. There is no reason we can't grow - while keeping everyone no more than 10 minutes from nature.
I agree. Thunder Bay could be a wonderful town if it was built properly. I enjoyed it there, in the few days I visited (while staying downtown). It's quite walkable in places.
Good luck with Victoriaville. From what I can tell, no one has any idea how to fix that problem. I live close to Westgate and the only thing I've ever walked to is a mailbox or a park. At least I now have a bicycle route across the whole city with mostly protected crossings.
@@coast2coast00 I'm willing to give downtown Fort William a chance post-Victoriaville! It used to be bumpin' (we're talking like the '20s here)... But I've got a feeling that Thunder Bay has to build up and not out - and the best way to do that is to give our downtowns a facelift. I don't know how old you are - but even if you can remember downtown Port Arthur back in like 2005 - we've come a LONG way.
Ive seen this and it's so much better. Seeing a small library turn into a cafe, into a gym. It was extremely flexible. Meanwhile going to downtown there is a huge Walmart sized buildings that have been abandoned since i was 8. Over a decade and nothing has changed
It can be dangerous to walk in the suburbs. Car drivers have no respect and there's no one else walking around to help when drivers insult or run into a pedestrian.
I’ve been there, so sad that I literally have to choose what time of day to walk to avoid cars, I do it now cause I nearly got run over by someone returning home from work who I guess was angry and flew into there driveway at 40kph and skimmed me and honked at me as if it was my fault I hate this shit
It's funny because most driver's ed often teaches their students that pedestrians have the right-of-way, yet that statement is no longer true after they get their driver's license.
@@emiliofernandez7117 Whenever me or my family walk in my neighborhood and if there is a car coming, we have to get off the road and move to the grass. It makes it very clear that the neighborhood is for the car and not for the pedestrian.
Most fast food taco places have funny tasting lettuce I personally find, maybe its a gene I have. Most of it tastes strongly/nauseatingly like cleaning chemicals.
what's incredibly interesting about this is that North American "suburban big house dream" has been exported around the world as well to a lot of other countries They see this process as "development", generating reverse gentrification, neglecting ready infrastructure, while not really having an alternative that is livable outside highways The thing to consider though in these countries is also population growth, even though it is quite dense and small, the Netherlands still has much more manageable population size compared to especially developing countries
I hate seeing people say... "look at this!!! It works in this country we should use it in america!!!" meanwhile they fail to mention that country has the population of a single american town and cant compare.
@@matthewhetes9965 You also fail to mention that the US is the wealthiest nation in the world, but the only to not provide basic needs for it's citizens which just about every other developed country does, and the only developed country without high speed rail, and crumbling infrastructure. Edit: not to mention the US has been spending trillions of dollars in a war in Afghanistan, and giving tax cuts to wealthy corporations. There's no excuse. If you can afford to waste money in a pointless war for 20 years while giving free money to corporation's, then there's no excuse why that money couldn't have been invested at home on your own people and infrastructure.
But this sort of phenomenon has been going on for centuries, but not as the result of a sense of freedom, but rather a stigma. In the Middle Ages, the people of the cities did not welcome people such as Jews and executioners into their cities, so they all had to congregate outside of them.
This is a major thing I didn't even realize was happening and yet of course it was so obvious. One massive big box store taking up the space of fifty smaller stores would of course generate less for the city. Of course it would have a much bigger economic impact if it went out of business compared to twenty of those fifty smaller stores going under... But it's something I had never thought about because being from the US, this is normal. This is all I've seen and all I've known for most of my life. It effects jobs in the area as well. One store with, let's say 150 employees versus fifty stores with six employees each. Which one is providing more jobs, which one is generating more for the economy? It's so obvious.
Your estimate for big box stores if widely off base. And smaller mom and pop stores have fewer employees too. And smaller stores can provide less service. 50 stores with 50 cashiers compared to 1 big box with 5 cashiers. that's 45 people wo can be employed on other more productive work.
I've finally caught up binge watching all your content, and now, all I can do is hit that bell button and wait for more content. I love this channel. It's opened my eyes to realize how many decades behind anywhere in the US is compared to The Netherlands' walkability.
@@Darknight73457 Maybe that's part of what initially triggered my process of idealizing the Netherlands in my head in the first place. There's a hint of familiarity, and yet it still seems to resolve many of the problems that frustrate me in the US. The UK might have had my interest if they weren't so politically divided and Brexit didn't happen. I much prefer the proportion representation system that the Netherlands has where it doesn't matter where you live. You have a large amount of political parties to choose from that more closely represents your views, and there's less frustration of having to vote for the "lesser evil." You just get your candidate in, and you can be satisfied that you did your part, and you can let them do the negotiations and coalition forming for you. I could go on, but this is already going on for long enough. I don't even mind if no one reads this fully. Sometimes it just helps me to type out my thoughts.
@@ex0stasis72 Uk has (in my opinion) a disgusting unrepresentative political system. Nigel Farage's party got the 15% in an election and it only got 1 MP. Canada, USA and other anglosaxon countries are bipartidist states de facto. I like the dutch system, but maybe it's too much atomizated. Every party can gets representation with a 1% of vote and that's too much chaotic then. Another bad thing of north european countries is the weather. I prefer to live in the corrupt south Europe because of weather and other things like social life, food quality, and incredible landscapes (In holland, belgium or England you don´t have real forrests or mountains). If I were an american triying to emigrate to Europe I would choose Austria. The problem is the language.
Perhaps some of the most heartbreaking results from this suburban expansion is the construction of freeways that destroyed neighbourhoods. Montreal, like most North American cities, got into a lot of urban sprawl with lots of car-dependent neighbourhoods with little to no transit. Freeways, like the Decarie, Metropolitan, and the A-720, destroyed many neighbourhoods and caused a significant increase in air pollution and car traffic, year by year. They even considered bulldozing Old Montreal to make way for a new freeway, but due to protests, it was moved slightly north into a tunnel. Nevertheless, lots of historic buildings in downtown Montreal were demolished to make way for ugly concrete buildings (like the Quebec district court just beside old Montreal). Now, don't let Montreal's beautiful European architecture in downtown fool you into thinking that Montreal is a transit-friendly city, because it's not. The car-dependent suburbs has had a hugely negative impact on downtown, and old Montreal, like many European cities that are very walkable on foot, actually allows cars to drive onto the cobblestone streets, and the intersections around the Notre-Dame Basilica has become some of the most dangerous intersections in the city, simply because the streets there were designed for 18th century pedestrian traffic, and because of that, few people would expect lots of cars to drive into Old Montreal. It's absolutely disgusting that the city doesn't ban cars there. In many North American cities with car-dependent suburbs, that helped the population develop a very strong car culture and anti-transit culture, and Montreal is no exception. In fact, the car culture in Montreal is particularly strong, and this was evident when proposals to ban cars from Sainte-Catherine street were published, and huge numbers of car-loving masochists were crying out loud protesting the reduction of parking space and the loss of revenue businesses there could suffer. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Banning cars from Ste-Catherine would significantly help businesses there as they depend much on foot traffic, rather than vehicular traffic, and a ban on cars significantly improves pedestrian safety and reduce air pollution. The narrow lanes of Ste-Catherine often results in traffic jams that causes traffic to spend at least 1 hour to travel a kilometre. And the car culture in Montreal has been equally vocal against transit expansion: the REM, a new automated subway system under construction, has seen its fair share of car-loving masochists protesting against the REM, in addition to riders on the Deux-Montagnes line as well, because they too love the car and prefer a commuter train that runs once an hour rather than a subway train that runs every 2 minutes. And finally, if you don't get why Montreal isn't a transit-friendly city, consider these facts: * Only 10/68 stations have elevators for wheelchairs. In Toronto, 47/75 are. In Vancouver, 100% are. * Metro trains run 4 minutes apart on rush hours, and 8-20 minutes at other times. On Vancouver's SkyTrain, frequencies are 90 seconds and 4 minutes respectively. In Toronto, 2 minutes and 6 minutes respectively. * Buses are poorly maintained, never on time, and always gets stuck in traffic. Like Dallas but unlike Amsterdam, Montreal has zero traffic calming, and the city has done nothing to reduce cars on the road. In much of the suburbs, like the West Island, there are only a handful of bus routes that run only one bus per hour, even during the rush hour! * Almost non-existent transportation to the airport. Most people drive or take a taxi there, because the only bus that goes there is an extremely overpriced bus that takes 90 minutes to get to downtown while stuck in traffic, and most buses in Montreal don't have air conditioning, have very few hard seats, and almost no suspension because the STM wanted to reduce costs in an inefficient way. In Toronto and Vancouver, they both have a comfortable, quick, affordable, and reliable train to the airport in under 30 minutes.
The bus from the airport to DT takes around 45 minutes and price is 10$, quite reasonable. But I agree with the rest. I lived downtown, near McGill, and I found public transit great (I love MTL subway, the stations are very unique) until I had to go outside downtown. There, it's a public transit no man's land. You only have unreliable buses for which you have to wait under extreme temperatures, something nobody wants to experience. Montreal is a great city for the culture, the food, its people but I don't my self living there because of that. I would prefer living in Vancouver or Calgary (public transit there sucks but you know what to expect lol and traffic is decent).
these videos will trigger many Americans, but you are right. I grew up in suburbia and I dont think I will live in a place like this as an adult, its just so boring.
@@sirpieman300 Well duh, when you grow up in a suburb that's separated from any cafes, pubs, stores, barbers, grocery stores, etc, due to zoning laws, there's no sense of community, so no shit it's boring. Did you watch the video?
@@ryanscott6578 Yea i did, and to me, none of those examples he showed of " suburban hell" were suburbs in my opinion, at least not where I live here in us. But perhaps what I think of the suburbs isn't really what qualifies as suburbs
@@rutgerb it's not politically loaded when you know the song by They might be giants. "why they changed it I can't say, people just liked it better this way"
Thankfully I live in a suburb that's somewhat walk friendly. My biggest issue is that all the jobs are mainly low paying. You can't have a job and enjoy a decent lifestyle in the same town in most cases. Unless you own a string of businesses or are high up in certain company, majority of people living in suburbs have to commute to another town, or more likely, get a job in the city to support their lifestyle in the suburbs.
Thank you so much for recommending the book Strong Towns and visualizing it so effectively here! This was one of those rare fascinating books that taught me something relevant about an important topic I have never really thought about before. I am grateful to live in a walkable European city (which I totally took for granted until now)
I started with the 4th episode in my recommended and after watching 1 I'm now at 2 and I gotta say it; The Untied States of America really dropped the ball, this place just doesn't feel like more of dump spiritually, it's actually becoming a dump by squandering it's money.
Thank you for making this video. I'm so glad that people are talking about this. America does not have to be this ugly or depressing. We need to retain undeveloped land and get rid of suburban style development.
It's surreal that this whole series of vids is based off of an organization in my backyard. having spent a good chunk of my life growing up in MN and currently still living here, I'm both proud to know that this organization is local to my area and also pretty distraught knowing just how bad we have it. a lot of the issues that both you and strong towns bring up are things i've always despised about the small towns i grew up in here & around the country, but never really had language for. it wasn't until college that i got to see the cities & fall in love with the denser, more navigable and lively style of living & started to hear about the concepts of transit, city planning, etc., but it's been research like this that has really piqued my interest. so thanks for putting it back on my mind. kinda surreal to think that a lot of this knowledge is coming out of a group based in the small town i used to spend many summer weeks in at a local camp. i've spent a summer interning for the city of minneapolis as an engineer, but i think i am only now slowly starting to really get passionate about this stuff. would be cool if maybe one day in my lifetime i saw some serious change around here for the better when it comes to infrastructure & planning...
watching this channel after growing up in a suburban cul-de-sac has been pretty enlightening, I've always known there's something that feels wrong about living here, but I've never really been able to put a finger on what or how to change things to feel better. Turns out, putting all of the people on the opposite side of the city from where they want to be doesn't actually make as much sense as just naturally spreading out areas around. Expand the city, don't make suburbs.
My American dream is to manage to live the live style I want (little driving, walking more, no lawn) despite of the economy and housing industry might want me to do
@Karym Eliya I agree with a lot of what you all said about the US. I am very thankful for the sacrifice of previous generations and the freedoms that we have, but I don’t know that I can live here for the rest of my life. I am living a decent life, but for some reason quality of life feels low. I hope to visit some European countries, especially The Netherlands, soon to experience them.
i'm dutch, we also have our share of failed developments, experiments, etc. and we don't learn. I live in Utrecht, and we're repeating the same mistakes in Leidsche Rijn in the 2000's as we did in IJsselsteijn and Nieuwegein in the 80's... suburbia, with no business life around it. its just a dead area.
@@MainMite06 I do also, but the problem I'm assuming you also have is that it's a pain to walk to them - you have to cross very dangerous roads and you look homeless to the point where you will do nothing but drive there
I mostly agree but the idea that somehow European cities were deliberately designed for sensible use is laughable. Hausman plowed through Paris in the later 1800s building huge boulevards to remove tight warrens of streets. Copenhagen wasn’t always bike friendly. This was the result of a deliberate policy shift in the 1970s
> the idea that somehow European cities were deliberately designed for sensible use is laughable [...] Copenhagen wasn’t always bike friendly. This was the result of a deliberate policy shift in the 1970s So what you're saying is Copenhagen was not always bike friendly and was deliberately designed for bike friendliness?
As someone who grew up in and around Brattleboro, the town at 6:45, I found the inclusion hilarious in that I was JUST talking about how Bratt is actually a pretty nice town in regards to the Strong Towns setup this morning! It's neat to see our little Vermont town pointed out, a bit startling too! It's actually a great example of exactly what you're talking about in that just out of frame to the left is a shop that was once a bookstore, then a hobby shop, then a cafe, then a burger joint, and is now a taco shop. Exactly the flexible location you're talking about!
With traditional development no car is needed. It is so liberating to not have a car. Even in November in Stockholm, I can still ride my bike and do what I need to do. If I had to I can use public transportation or get a taxi.
In Jakarta, there are whole suburban towns built by private developers, and for me, they often look the same, big roads, lots of greenery, and low rise housing came in the form of gated communities. Often they advertised travel time from the nearest highway or promote a “foreign” lifestyle
Yep. With nonsensical landmark such as a big clock or... 7 wonders of the world. Uh oh, dont forget a big ass mall where everyone from nearby town visit
Hey! Real estate finance guy here. While I agree with you wholeheartedly that suburbs are a terrible way to plan cities, @5:00 you mention that the Taco John's building will only decrease in value from here. However, this is far from true. Real estate value generally appreciate over time regardless of where they are located. This is why that 1920s building can be worth $1+ million today. It wasn't worth anything close to a million bucks in the 1920s. For for-rent commercial space, like the Taco John's site and the old 1920s group of buildings, the property value is primarily based on how much income it makes from the tenants (rent less expenses = income. income/capitalization rate = value). In this case, it appears that the 1920s building is quite a bit larger than the Taco John's, thus likely having higher income and higher value. Anyway, my only point is that you can't assume that property values do nothing but depreciate. Real estate is not a depreciating asset. This might help you rethink these city insolvency issues, as well. As values increase, so do taxes. Love your channel!
I think in that sentence he is not referring to land value (because he's comparing it to a plot of same size and practically same location), he is talking about the value of the actual building (old cheap constructs vs new recently built construct), which is why he later says "beginning of life" vs "end of life". The building does decrease in value until maintenance is performed.
I still have PTSD from those 16 lane highways in the Down-Thompon-Paradox episode. Imagine having a canyon like that between your residential buildings, basically as your regular street.
@@Dark__Thoughts I live near a 26 lane freeway, the Katy Freeway, in Texas. The greater Houston area is a such a suburban sprawl nightmare that the band Arcade Fire made an entire award-winning album about how terrible it is.
We had a hotel in the city center of Miami last year, but for anything to eat or going out we had to take the car to the mall in the outskirts of the city. Everywhere in Europe you go to the city center for fun in the USA you have to leave the city center.
Lightly touched upon it in the video but yeah, small compact stores are easy to replace or change over. Some time it's as simple as changing the sign out front to go from a Barber Shop to nail Salon. However the big box stores tend to love to have their custom designed buildings and parking lots. They won't just take over another stores spot. Thus when that Kmart or Walmart shuts down that lot stays empty for years, if it ever gets replaced. Because not only do companies only want their own design for a building, it's so big and sold as a package no small business could afford to buy just part of it.
It's funny yet awesome how based this channel is. Your videos do an excellent job at articulating the weirdness I see with infrastructure here in the US and how it can be better. I’m not a civil engineer, but these videos are always interesting to watch.
![Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [ST03]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7IsMeKl-Sv0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [ST03]](/img/tr.png)
![How Bankrupt American Cities Stay Alive - Debt [ST04]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XfQUOHlAocY/mqdefault.jpg)
Watch the rest of this series here:
ua-cam.com/play/PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa.html
Why are suburbs still being built
Just to correct since you brought Canada, have you visited Vancouver or Montreal ? Its anything North American suburb. Not all Canadian cities are suburban.
2:53 Cities: Skylines!!!!
@@javieraravena3972 look at the state of American cities, especially Progressive ran cities. They are monuments to human suffering, crime and filth.
The suburbs are The Refuge from these monstrosities. And they represent a way of living and thinking that's anathema to those geared towards a communal utopian fairytale
@@TheOpenSociety777 The state of American cities and American "society" as a whole are the result of 40+ years of anti-social and unsustainable neoliberal capitalist ideology. That's patently obvious to anybody paying even a modicum of attention.
Regardless, the suburbs are living on borrowed time, and there's nothing you can do about it. The ongoing ecological collapse we're experiencing is about to give all of you spoiled Amerifat crybabies such a ferocious ass-kicking that it's not even funny...
(I'm kidding, of course, it's _very_ funny... Enjoy your McBug burgers and Amazon pod homes $$$ :D:DD)
Now hold up: those formerly big box stores aren't just abandoned! They have to become a Spirit Halloween first and THEN they are abandoned.
I've lived in the U.S. suburbia. There are several big challenges with the lifestyle, including kids being dependent on their parents to go anywhere and always having either me or my wife not drinking when going out.
Yep. I have a video about why we won't raise our kids in suburbia. I probably should make a video about drunk driving some day.
As someone who lives in a big city that doesn’t require a car (Chicago), it always surprises me to see such big parking lots at bars in the suburbs. Seems like a really weird message.
@@NotJustBikesIf there was a poll on this, I suspect that most people would feel the opposite. Most people feel that the suburban environment is much more kid-friendly. In fact, I worry about most of the development efforts in my city (St. Louis.) They seem to be targeting young people without kids and retirees...but I don't see much effort to create "family friendly" environments.
@@stevebruns1833 He's not raising kids in a N. American city, he's raising them in urban Netherlands. Urban N. America can be as trashy as suburbia or worse
@@stuffums From what I understand, the American matchup between urban=poor and suburban=affluent is backwards in Europe. He didn't make it clear that he was talking from a European perspective. To American ears, it sounded ludicrously out-of-touch.
It's also important to understand the impact of alienation that comes from this dispersal into suburbs. Less interaction with your neighbors, less solidarity with them, less involvement in local government/community and organizing. The modern suburb help kill US labor movement.
Solidarity is a myth. No one in european cities worries about its neighbours. That real solidarity only happened in old villages and small towns.
@@Darknight73457 you are so wrong on this that's it's basically clear you didn't think it thru. Which is ok, it's easy to be reactionary in a UA-cam comment. You are mixing up "real" solidarity with something else. American cities are literally nightmare traps where it's easy to never interact with another human face to face. Our world is one of other cars and drive thru menus. Pull together data on population density, public transit, public space, you'll find strong corolatations with union membership. I get it, you want to start shit on UA-cam comments, I hope you find a more rewarding use of your time. Unsub to those conservative channels, go spend some cash on onlyfans vs UA-cam foot pages, you'll feel better.
You touched on a very interesting point: green space. People love to talk about how modern-style neighborhoods and buildings are more nature-friendly. As if a useless lawn and a dozen bushes could prevent global warming. Or worse: as if they compensated the gas emissions of hundreds of SUVs driving miles a day just to get groceries.
Also, often these green spaces are mono-culture waste lands. I noticed the difference when walking along a wild meadow in my neighbourhood. Domestic flowers etc. were sown there ten years ago. In the beginning not much happened, but now, ~ 15 years later, I can identify at least twenty different plant species, as compared to less than five on a close-by typical suburb meadow. Thus: green space isn't always quality space.
Lawns are pretty intense for water consumption, not great.
@@wenkeli1409 If you mow the grass short every week, your lawn dries out with a little sun and becomes a desert. You can change that by cutting the grass longer (move the blades up) and only cut it once a month, and only half the patch in different patterns. This way you'll get a lawn with grass in different heights, your lot will hold moisture better, you'll enable butterflies to develop, it attrackts more insects, thus more birds. My dad used to water his roses every day. I don't need to water them now, and we've had record dry years.
The purpose of green spaces was never about offsetting global warming. That's a bit of a strawman.
''green space'' isn't green space. Lawns are ecologically speaking as biodiverse as a desert. No matter if you leave the grass a bit longer. Only way to improve biodiversity is to allow a greater diversity of species, like lawn flowers, weeds and such. But even then nothing compares to letting patches of lawn just grow wild with meadow plants...
Another thing that I want to add, and I'm not sure if you are going to touch on it later on in this series or on other videos on your channel, is the fact that walkable urban design allows disabled people to exist in a community
My husband became disabled in 2019, and had to retire from his job due to his disability and lost his ability to drive because even here in the heart of American automotive culture, they don't let you drive if you have seizures.
Not being able to drive has been an absolute nightmare for him because most of our town is not accessible on foot, and it limits my daily activities as well. For example, I cannot take a job where I may have to travel regularly because I cannot afford to be away from home overnight and leave my husband and young child without access to a vehicle in the event of an emergency. We require far more support from family and friends just so that they do not wind up being effectively stranded at home if I do have to be away for any amount of time
Additionally, our city puts off all sidewalk maintenance onto individual property owners, and the only enforcement for having a dangerously damaged or snow-covered sidewalk comes in the form of a citation when someone calls the city to complain about a specific property, so much of sidewalks in our residential neighborhoods, especially older neighborhoods, is wildly out of ADA compliance and unsafe under the best of circumstances for someone who has mobility impairments that require use of a mobility aide and/or those with young children in strollers
It's just amazing how much freedom we really have to pursue life, liberty, and happiness here in America (sarcasm)
my grandmother's neighborhood was demolished and they built a Costco and a Distillery over it, filled with empty parking space. Modern suburbia truly is a cancer on today's cities
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:(
In my town they completely demolish a motel and a good, authentic, local, and family-owned Mexican restaurant in favor of building another gas station. My town already has a lot of gas stations, so I don't know why they felt the need to build another one. I really miss that restaurant (╯︵╰,)
@@kittykittybangbang9367 I'm surprised they didn't replace it with a Mattress World, a dollar store, or some auto-body shop since those businesses love spreading around suburbs like a weed.
It saddens me when I see a photo of a main street of a small town and then if that town was near enough to be absorbed into a city's suburbs that main street gets demolished and replaced with a stroad with no pavements and big box stores. In the UK when a city expands into a village many of the original village buildings are kept though they might be refurbished with shop fronts or left as cottages with the shops built nearby.
Having a car where I live is completely mandatory. Without one you are completely unable to function as a human being, it's incredible. That is just the culture here, everything is too far apart and too sparsely populated for public transport to be viable, and no one wants to open more stores in areas that only house a few thousand people. I'd be interested if someone found a way to break the habit of mandatory drivability in the future.
This. I didn't think it was a problem until I got to college. My college is in downtown. But driving 45 minutes to and from the city for 4 days a week is draining. I was used to the idea that adults drive.
Then, I realized it was not completely for me because driving for more than 45 minutes to work or school is miserable and stressful to me (driving itself is not stressful but dealing with traffic is because people don't know how to drive apparently). I am able to commute via public transport but American's public transport is not completely reliable.
And I wish it did. Having a simple life is a dream now.
@@xStarstargirlx I went to HS in Melbourne's CBD and then moved to a 'small city' that absolutely requires me to have a car just to do errands. It wasn't until I came across this channel that I realised i was missing the walkability
where I live kind of too, when I came to the states as a teenager, I was disappointed how reliable one has to be on a car , and how you cant walk to anything , and how much more boring it is in the suburbs
I have a battery-electric bicycle. I lost one spoke on the rear hub, and the company that made the bike doesn't have parts. So, if I want to replace that one spoke, I have to drive 35 miles to a shop that custom makes them! So, in spite of having the battery-electric bicycle, I still have to depend on my car.
Reminds me of tales about the old west - where a horse was a necessity in getting around, and horse thieves were severely punished. Yet at the very same time, people living in eastern cities had other ways of travel (starting in the late 19th century) even inter-urban....by electric tram. That was an era when so-called suburbs were referred to as 'streetcar.'
Population density is what makes mass transit work. It is only financially viable when people live close together, relatively speaking.
Could be that ultimately what breaks the habit of mandatory drivability in the future - is affordability.
As a young person I always dreamed of moving to the US based on all the things I would see on TV and films (which now I see are reflective of either the stunning natural landscapes of America, the charming very small New England-like towns or the vibrant cities like New York but completely unreflective of the sprawling, sterile, car-dependent, boring swaths of urban America more generally). Now as an adult I am ever more grateful that I don't live in America and part of me is pained to say that.
I'm also starting to understand the social problems that seem to plague the modern United States, from mass shootings to strange religious and political cults: living in that car dominated, monotonous sprawl has to do something unpleasant to the psyche of a nation.
What I forgot to add was that what gives me hope is that in my experience the people of the US (and Canada) are big-hearted, generous, kind and creative and so one day when the obstacles of inertia and the ideological blinkers are overcome, they will be well placed, better placed even than many other societies, to turn these problems around and create places that are truly good for people and the natural environment too.
@@chrstopherblighton-sande2981 nice comment ❤️
@@chrstopherblighton-sande2981 What a kind comment. Couldn’t agree more with both comments
Suburbs are pretty common in american media. Of course, just from watching it foreigners don't realize all the problems with it.
Absolutely, people are too isolated, which brings about many unintended social problems
2:07 I know that feeling, but in reverse. I've never seen anything like a suburban place, I lived my entire life in France and I must tell you : I really don't understand how can people in USA/Canada can live in such places where you need to take your car to buy food, nor can I understand how anyone could have thought it could be a good idea to so-drastically separate the living place from the commercial place.
well we don't either but here we are. i guess someone has to pull out out of the hole
Who thought it was a good idea? Car companies and gasoline producers.
I have the same feeling. In the shot at 2:07 you see a kids' playyard with a parking lot in front. How ridiculous is that? Why not walk or bike there?
@@NorthernSeaWitch Yep, the US had a lot of railroads and wanted to build a lot of railways back when it 1st began but then car company started to lobby and thus giving the US a big problem
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When I roadtripped the US, as soon as I did not have a hotel/hostel/bnb in a city centre there was nothing within walking distance. Wanted to eat? Car ride. Shopping? Car ride. Groceries? Car ride. If you drive for 6-8 hours to your new destination the last thing you want is another 15 minutes to get some food after you checked in.
And all suburbs were dead of life. Nothing to see, nothing to do.
@@sys-administrator you can at least walk to the restaurant instead of driving there, enabling you to drink away your sorrow with lots of alcohol!
@@sys-administrator yep and 15 minutes is just not that long
@@ElPestino i think you miss the whole point of being fed up with sitting in a car after 6-8 hours....
@@sys-administrator Actually Dutch cities will also have places to eat in walking distance, even outside the city center. Because we do zone in retail and mixed use in mostly residential areas. We create small to large 'malls' (buurtwinkelcentrum) and places for at least a cafetaria (snackbar) and a pizzeria or kebab place in every new development larger than a few football field. So a new area for 3.000 homes would also have a supermarket and some shops and places for food and drinks in it, in walking or cycling distance. And usually some high rise near those services with bus or tram connections to the city center, and lower density housing further away fromd the services area.
The mono-functional zoning of North america was in this channel before. It looks like an awful plan.
@@d947 So much beautiful natural space in the US, better make sure we fill up as much of it as possible with suburbs!
"their depressingly, soul crushingly, dystopian car-dependant suburbs"
"not just because these suburbs are ugly, devoid of life and soul crushingly sterile"
Sir, you have no chills 😂
The hate is very understandable
Yeah, it undermines the message
stop! stop! they're already dead! Because they didn't have health care!
@@val4414 I mean, they may not know about it, but they definitely are living in a dystopian hellscape.
@@JohnSmith-cx8co "Undermines the message." here is the problem: Strong Towns made this exact video. Like basically the same content. It's the one I link to in the video. It has a serious tone and no joking around or bashing the suburbs.
It had just over 5K views in the past *4 years.* This video had more views than that within the first hour.
I made this video to get the word out about Strong Town's research. Which of these two videos will do that best? The straight-up factual one that Strong Towns released four years ago, or this one that "undermines the message" with jabs at the suburbs?
I would be happy to put out straight factual content without the silliness, but the fact is, nobody would watch it. Will I turn away some people by making fun of the suburbs? Absolutely. But I will ultimately draw a larger audience, and get the message out to more people. So in the end, it's more effective this way. People can always share the Strong Towns version with friends in suburbia if they want to anyway.
And besides, car-dependant suburbia is shit and the comments are well-deserved. If that's a problem, then perhaps these suburbs should stop sucking so much?
It's so weird to realize how impractical suburban development in the USA is. As a non-American consuming tons of American Media growing up, i've always been fascinated by American Suburbs. The cul de sacs, the open spaces, the large driveways, the white picket fences and frontyard gardens. I used to find them so beautiful growning up in a place where there's nothing like it. But now i'm actually not into it anymore. As you said, they're just... bland. And Jesus Christ, having a car is a good thing when it's NOT a necessity, but a way to spoil yourself.
There are nice ones that grew organically and as a result have things around them.
The issue are ones that are manufactured due to people wanting/needing to have access to a major city and not being able to afford it. They have nothing but houses for 10-15 minutes of driving.
"It's only downhill from here" when showing the closed Taco Bell (or whatever it was) is even an understatement - because unlike these "jucky old buildings" down the road, the fast food restaurant literally can't be anything BUT a fast food restaurant. If the spot isn't good enough anymore, taxable value isn't 40% of the other lot - it's 0%.
^^^ this guy gets it. 😁
@@NotJustBikes My brother's girlfriend is from the states. It was an eye-opening experience to take her shopping in our european city. At first she was like "THAT'S what you call a mall? how small is this town?" when we went to a shopping centre for the first time. But then followed the almost childish amazement of walking through the town around that shopping centre and all the shops and the buzzing athmosphere in a pedestrian-only zone. I mean, it certainly helped that it was approaching christmas back then and the town was full of decorations, but she actually said: "The entire city feels like a christmas village. That is so cool."
@@NotJustBikes This is something I've been thinking about with some of my town's local strip malls. Smaller units kinda come and go, but the big boxes are a tall order. Two big boxes are former grocery stores (the area has, or had, a lot of those for our population for some reason) - and they're so large the only thing you're putting in there is another grocery store. This doesn't seem viable because the grocer that was there before didn't make it for some reason that the new one will probably not really avoid either. The rest are restaurants and general retailers, which aren't doing so hot either. I guess Spirit helped plug two of them for a little while, at least.
Plus, they keep building new stripmalls and leaving the old ones to kinda waste away, just as you said. Plenty of empty units in the strips right near me, but no, they built a brand new one in between the ones I live near and another older strip mall that also has empty units. And before that said new one filled every store, they went and built another (though they thankfully tore down another old crumbling one old one before building it) and even that hasn't filled all its units over the last 4 years or so.
On the bright side, this stretch of development seems denser than a lot of other sprawling hells, so I guess I can count my blessings there.
@@ME-hm7zm They possibly build that new one, because the developer makes money this way. They only build the stuff and deliver it turnkey to the people who will manage the place. So they've made their money and now they're grasshopping to another place. They don't care about the long term state of a property, because they don't need to, it's no longer their problem.
@@peterslegers6121 Very probable, yeah. On the upside, the newest strip mall is strictly more useful than the old one, so we lucked out in that specific way (it not only replaced a partially unused strip, but also incorporated what was a decrepit and largely abandoned trailer park). It also helped fuel some road development (county doesn't do new roads, just manages them), which included some really nice bike lanes (for the US anyways).
Great video, and the audio didn't even sound funny.
Cynthia rates this video 4/5 stars.
It boggled my mind when I first went to the US and tried to.. go somewhere. People don't walk to places. Doesn't matter from where to where, people don't walk (except maybe in the Downtown which is usually the oldest neighborhood of the city). This video series explains why is that and why I had a hard time finding a coffee shop nearby on foot..
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It's no wonder why America has an overweight problem
@@kittykittybangbang9367 🤡🤡🤡
@@pjt.4841 why are you spamming those emojis everywhere?
@@kittykittybangbang9367 He's trying to tell everyone he's a clown
Just by playing sim city 2000 I recognised that having commercial and residential areas separated by roads was stupid and lead to decline.
I used to design cities in cities: skylines the way I had always seen them living in america, after watching these video I found that not only did my city do way better financially, it also had way less traffic, and most of that was from work and service vehicles
SimCity 2000 is the best versioj imho
I came here for dutch city planning stuff (mostly to improve my cities in cities skylines).
I stayed because you ranting about north american city "design" is extraordinarily entertaining.
The problem with that is that cities skylines only has American buildings unless you download a whole set of assets but I could never though
@@alexanderosullivan9764 except that there's a theme in the vanilla game called "European" filled with European buildings. There are certain maps that use that set of buildings by default.
@@namenamename390 and those european buildings aren't really european
@@LilliD3 they look European, that's enough for me. Of course, they aren't mixed use, that's a flaw of the game and affects the american buildings as well
@@namenamename390 have you been to Europe? They don't really look european coming from a european living in Europe. They are better than the regular buildings, but not good enough
To explain the 'funny-tasting lettuce' thing: I guess it's an American thing, but lettuce here in the states can sometimes be 'washed' with a food-safe rinse. The rinse, if not fully removed, can leave the lettuce slightly more bitter or chemical-y than usual. The food packaging plants don't really bother too well with rinsing the lettuce (a cost-cutting measure) and do the bare minimum for food safety standards wherever they can get away with it (again, for cost-cutting). Good, fresh places do a decent job of rinsing off the lettuce in-house before serving it to customers, but cheaper places just pull it from the bulk packaging and throw it in a metal tub until a customer orders something with lettuce in it. Other vegetables can receive the same treatment, but lettuce is one of the most noticeable because a) it's usually served raw, and b) lettuce doesn't have much flavor on its own anyway (so the bitterness of the food-safe rinse stands out against the 'nothing flavor' of lettuce).
Oh, by the way, that cost-cutting stuff is more for the big-heads' paychecks rather than to make it more affordable for everyone or pay their workers a better wage.
Netherlands suburbs are really a good example of where we should head. Everyone gets a house, sure-but everything is walkable.
And if it isn't walkable, it's at least cyclable.
@@InfernalNiek And its safe to cycle
Its almost culturally ingrained in us in the US to want a sort of "frontier" lifestyle where you have your own land and get to travel into town once a week to pick up supplies. The frontier lifestyle is essentialy where the american dream came from.
I thing that the Dutch suburbs were lucky to be erected when the esteem of public transport had just passed its lowest point. So, at least, cities like Houten, Heerhugowaard and (from scratch) Almere were planned along railroads, but with the exception of (at least) Almere-Haven (planned around a circular bus route), they definitely look car-centric to me. (Keyword"Vinex", but I'm speaking from my own memory and experience.)
A more recent development, especially in the re-development of sections inside cities, may be the planning of provisions (please substitute the appropriate term for "voorzieningen") around stations. A good example may be the station area of Zaandam, but the metro station of Rotterdam Zuidplein may be an earlier example. The area of metro station Amsterdam Noord is under re-development to that view.
@@chrislaarman7532 provision is the correct word. "pro-" corresponds to "voor-" and "-vision" corresponds to "-ziening"
I do groceries, I forget milk, I walk back. Never again will I feel sorry for myself when this happens
The same. The closest store is less than a minute walk for me.
@@irasthewarrior rip my closest store is 30 min walk away
@@emiliofernandez7117 I'm sorry :(
@@irasthewarrior yeah it sucks I’ve been living here on my street for 4 years and I’ve never once seen a kid on a bike it’s crazy
@@irasthewarrior I mean it makes sense cause there’s only a footpath on one side of the road and cars fly by at 60 kph infront of my house so everyone only drives everywhere my city feels lifeless even though there’s a lot of people in it :(
There’s also a financial impact on the personal finances of the people using those blocks too. One block allows for more business owners with middle class incomes, while the other only has room for a few minimum wage jobs.
Good point.
"Depressingly soul crussing, sterile, ugly, car dependent, dystopian..." "filled with fast food..." "these big box suburbs are actually making communities poorer..." Yup sounds like the entire Dallas Ft Worth metroplex...👍
Don’t forget the Tolls!!
Say louder for those in back!!
REAL. TALK. Finally moved away from DFW about 2 years ago 🙌🏽
LMAO glad I'm not the only one suffering
Oh man I'm so glad you said that. I totally hate it here.
For anyone wondering, this is what most of Australia is like too. People move to Melbourne to try to get away from it but we almost all wind up in the suburbs eventually 😭🥲
St Kilda FTW!
@@JamesSecretofski that is exactly the first suburb I lived in in Melbourne. It is a very common place to find new Melbournians.
I think the inner suburbs are walkable . Beyond about 10km from the GPO becomes problematic though (and let's not even start on the 25km+ range)!
@@alexwilder8315 that's where I live still. Probably the only suburb in Melbourne where everything is walkable and with some rudimentary bicycle infrastructure, though there's no such thing as good bicycle infrastructure in Melbourne. As soon as you're on a bicycle here, you're a cyclist.
@@PostImperfect anything outside of St Kilda in the SE and Fitzroy on the North circle and you need to drive to the shops cafes, and don't get me started on the lack of protected bicycle lanes.
Your best metric of walkability in the area is wether you can live here without a car.
I lived in Brooklyn for 7 years in my late 30’s early 40’s after being born/raised in the New Jersey suburbs. I loved that I could walk or take public transit for virtually all my needs. Why did I leave? Couldn’t afford to buy a house/condo so I moved back to the suburbs. Now I miss the neighborhood, but not the crappy, overpriced apartment.
Something this video doesn't touch upon is that yes, suburbs may be uglier and car centric, but the expirement succeeded for the average citizen, as can be seen with most Americans living in suburbs. I currently live in a city but the rent price I pay is quite exorbanently high. The convince of not having to use a car does not outweigh the cost of a car.
@@Kajamazvideos Yes, but if more investment were made in downtowns instead of suburbs, there would be a greater supply of (expanded) downtown housing and thus it would cost less....
@@MsYolost How? I'm genuinely curious
I currently live in Manhattan, a few feet away from Gracie Mansion, paying roughly a third of my salary on rent of a one bedroom apartment with a wonderful back yard. I have relatively few other expenses, so I have healthy savings and investments. I love walking to work, and I entertain A LOT. I have a dog, and there’s nothing better than these brisk fall days when I get together with friends to take our dogs to Central Park, or walk over to Randall’s Island where they can swim in the river and run through the woods. And the ferry system is such a relaxing way to get to the other boroughs.
I grew up in the suburbs, then as an adult lived in different towns and cities in France and Italy. I loved how walkable they all were. Coming back to the States, I was glad to get a car and live in the suburbs of Orlando, Fl - until I wasn’t. Yes I did have a lot more space, but the driving everywhere got annoying. Being able to walk everywhere seems a lot more natural to me. I know a lot of people left the city during the pandemic, but I never considered it for a second. I’ll never live in the suburbs again.
@@Kajamazvideos rent is high because of other issues.
"Lettuce didn't even taste funny" is the most American thing I've ever read.
Mhm. Sterotype
5 star restaurant standards
How? Since when are Americans known for having funny tasting lettuce lmao.
@@alleghanyonce I don’t think it’s about the lettuce itself, but America is known for the low quality of their fast food, I think that’s the stereotype they are referring to. I don’t buy fast food that often but I have had a few experiences with no so fresh lettuce in my burgers.
Lettuce 🥬 the green killer
Some of my biggest problems with the suburbs are just because of how backwards the goals seem to be. Youd think a benefit of a suburb would be to walk to bike, yet most of them have small streets with 1/2 of the residents parking their cars on the street when their driveway is empty.
The people tend to be unhealthy and just generally rude/superior, especially if you dont put a lot of work into your yard. Suburbia is supposed to be a sign of success but the people in them dont reflect it. At least in my experience.
My daughter was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When she was nine years old, we moved to the US and stayed at first with my brother. On her first day, she looked out of the window of the suburban home and said, "Where are the people?" We now live in Istanbul, Turkiye in a very walkable neighborhood.
Honestly, kinda curious about those flaming hot chilli burritos...
I'm most interested in the Pork Street Tacos, personally. Meet you at the nearest Taco John's? 😂
Taco Johns opened in 1969. Papa Johns in 1984. Taco Bell 1962.
I can literally taste them with imagination vividly enough to say "not worth my time"
flaming or flamming? i'd hate to get a drumstick in my burrito
Jokes aside, Taco John's has pretty good food. way better than the Bell.
6:43 We got mighty close to the almost no scenario in 2020
From what I heard about the US, in April 60% of small businesses in the US said they would not last until October and would need to permanently close.
I wanted to say: not all of them, but f-ing 60% is a lot !
Phly! What are you doing here? We're talking about stores and houses, not airports!
@@autohmae Small businesses close every single day for a variety of reasons. External impacts like COVID give dying businesses a mortal blow. Even without COVID, about 96 percent of small businesses (1-99 employees) that enter the marketplace survive for one full year, 85 percent survive for three years and 70 percent survive for five years (Key Small Business Statistics). PPP loans were supposed to cover people's prior 6 months revenues and keep people employed. If those were already low and you were projected to close down your business anyway, COVID wasn't the mainf factor (nor did it help). It sucks, but small businesses are inherently risky and the life and death cycle of them is what sustains competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Agree, however this is a once in a century catastrophe and it, too, shall pass.
@@TigerKhan1990 we just started this century... If you think COVID is the great challenge of our time, wait till WWIII starts haha.
Honestly I’ve always wondered why my town is so depressing and has nothing to do. Finally some answers, this all lined up with what I’ve observed in my life.
I have literally never cared about city planning in my entire life but your videos are so interesting and fun to watch! Thank you for making them!
@@val4414 Honestly, forget that. If you've ever left the US, you realize that a lot of countries are just more human accessible.
I just read Strong Towns after your first video and it was a complete wake-up call. I knew before reading it that I preferred walkable cities, but I didn't realize how _fundamentally_ we have screwed up city development in the US. Our suburbs have no where to go but down.
Now read the Strong Towns articles about Detroit and you'll be able to see the future of your town as well, if things keep going as they are. 😱
www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/11/4/we-are-all-detroit-2019
you can keep your walkable cities, I'll stick with my car and bike-friendly and much less crowded suburbs, though even there slowly becoming to crowed these days it seems
@@sirpieman300 That's not the point. The point is that these "suburbs" are not sustainable in the long run, and many have gone bankrupt because the revenue they bring is not enough to cover infrastructure and service costs.
@Joe Blowe no. Stop using those woke terms. He's just pointing out the obvious flaws of american style development
Okay, so when is the big fall then? when is our big collapse? "American cities are ready to crumble!! American suburbs are crumbling!., " all i see are more being built, developed, and bought into.
This video is really interesting, and really strikes a point. However I'd like to emphasize that not all of Europe is perfect. For instance, in my country (France), the same model of suburbs has expanded over the years, leading to the problems expressed in this video. Many of the people taking part in the yellow vest riots in 2019 were suburbans whose lifestyles have been decaying over the last decades.
France has got a good balance between houses and big buildings of flats, I think. Your main problem is that all your architecture (with the exception of bretagne) follows the same parisian model.
@@Darknight73457 How is that a problem? Unless you're saying 'parisian' to mean something else besides the architecture style I don't see the issue.
In a way it seems almost directly proportional to the size of the country, at least in Europe. I know we definitely have that in Sweden as well, especially on the outskirts of wealthy cities.
Il y a des zones commerciales comme celle ci mais elles sont loins d'être la majorité.
Et puis surtout les zones résidentielles sont quand même rarement aussi étendu et dépourvu de batiment.
I've recently come from a city in Europe where I had never owned a car for 10 years to California where my first year of commuting felt like I was living in the car. Great video! Subscribing, yo!
Yeah the California driving situation is... not great. Take it from someone who's lived here their whole life lol. And it's only gotten worse.
Love our cars!
Moved to completely different part of the world, complains when things change and arent how you're used to them?
@@Crazy_Diamond_75 "California driving situation.." nah try "US driving situation" (with the exception of NYC and that's about it).
Why the hell did you move here!?
These suburbs are like what desertification is to forests but for cities. They create massive swaths of land that you have no reason to visit unless you are going to your house or someone who know. They are less productive as mentioned in this video and they suck out funds via big box stores, the only type of store that can survive this environment.
But that is exactly where I would want to live. Why would I want you, or indeed anyone else who doesn't live in my neighbourhood, or at least someone visiting someone who does, to be wandering around making noise and generally cluttering up the neighbourhood needlessly? Everyplace should be someplace nobody would go unless they lived there
@Func the Fucc I believe that Rural life is the best life and that the closer a person lives to a population center the more miserable they are. Cities are a zit on the face of the earth
Mark Hadley not everyone is you. I grew up in an exurban/semi rural area and mostly hated it. I liked being surrounded by nature, but hated the ugly endless parking lots of what passed for “town”, the extreme car dependency, having to beg my parents for a ride to do literally anything. I didn’t feel like I lived in a real place as much as a house in it’s own dimension with soulless stores locked off in another only accessible by car. Now I live in a major European city and I vastly prefer it in basically every way. Don’t assume everything prefers the same things you do.
Colonel Green Colonel Green sure and those places should exist too. But in most of America people have basically no choice but to live in those endless suburbs unless they’re capable of affording the scarce amounts of ridiculously expensive housing in dense walkable neighborhoods. I was mainly replying to that guy’s assertion that rural living is the only right way of living. It just comes down to a trade off. If you want to sacrifice the ability to walk places and to enjoy the vibrancy of a city for quiet and space, that’s fine. But don’t decide that’s the only correct way of living.
@@markhadley1545 Most people that live in an area aren't likely to go out of their way to go to new stores once they have their chosen spots to shop at. Tourism, no matter how much it's hated, is often needed, because these are people wanting to experience something new and will shop off the beaten path, providing the much needed income for niche stores. Why do you think so many states here in the U.S. were breaking the CDC guidelines well before they should've, just to open back up again? Tourism. They need the money.
As a kid in the ATL suburbs, one of my best friends HATED living down here after moving down from NYC cause he was used to being able to walk places and not need a parent to drive him around everywhere and actually having things to do
That awkward moment when you’ve eaten at that exact Taco John’s
I’m so sorry
How was the lettuce?
@@Stoatshine Probably tasted funny.
That awkward moment when you’ve driven in the same parking lot, right up next to that closed Steve And Barry’s @ 6:13.
Oh my God same. Half my family lives in the area 😭
My parents were in their mid 30s when we all emigrated to Canada in 1955 and I know for a fact that much of my mother’s homesickness for Haarlem and her childhood cities of Sneek and Hindeloope was because of the lack of gezelligheid in our cities here.
Not to mention how overwhelmingly these suburban "parking lot plains" favor corporate chains as tenants. They demand long-term leases and the insurance is nearly impossible for a small boutique business to be able to afford as overhead.
🤡
And we started to do this shit in Germany too. But worse, car centric cities are also affecting regular inner city residential districts. In the past we had a lot more stores in the ground floor too, right in the middle of residential buildings. They ranged from supermarkets, over cafes, to backer's and butchers, and you could just get a lot of daily produce or something to eat nearby. Now you have to move further to the next bigger supermarket (of course with its own parking lot), or you have to drive / walk to the inner city where all kinds of stores are in one spot (with a lot of useless ones, like mobile phone stores, which just block potentially useful spots), but those inner city parts are also not very nice to stay in because they are just walkways with stores on the left and right. Kinda like a big mega store, but on the outdoors, instead of having more recreational use within them. All the little stores that were dotted around eventually died, because the more car centric a city became, the more people rather went to the bigger stores or inner cities instead, and every other part, including the residential areas became sort of a no mans land, aside from the few poor pedestrians without a car (Hi!).
This whole issue is actually an important topic for the climate debate too, especially for the US where car traffic makes up for such a large amount of their emissions. They really need to redesign their cities to be less car centric overall, so that people are also okay with taking other forms of transport, or maybe even just walk the distance.
The town in the Netherlands I life in the city center shops many are empty and some 5 to10 years ago they put up Mediamarkt, Ikea, etc. on the city border near the highway. I'm still not sure if that brought in more visitors from other regions and thus helped the down town to get new business or if it meant people didn't go into town anymore. Probably a bit of both. The Internet it the down town's biggest competitor I think.
'liquor store could become a cannabis dispensary' Isn't it funny how cities improv over time?
Wait did you mean to say "improv" or "improve"? Because those are two different terms that could work equally well. :)
Don't change it now because you'll lose the heart on your comment, though.
I love playing “what business can replace the previous one” improv with my friends
@@kawaiidere1023 I almost spit drink out laughing as I read this.
@@shrike6259 Totally! And they spend $$$ on coffee, bakeries and restaurants. So the whole town improves. This happened in Edmonton. The city got a little better after legalization, but I wouldn't go back there on a vacation.
oh boy mids full of PGRs
As someone who grew up in New England (actually from the Brattleboro area, so I was super excited to see a street I know pop up in one of these videos), I could never quite put my finger on why the vast, flat, spread out strip mall approach to urban design always rubbed me wrong. I'm enjoying the way these videos pull on those threads.
Watching these videos as an American who is currently living in a suburb makes me sad and frustrated. I hope things change here but it’s not going to happen anytime soon
lol then move to another country
@@hellfreezer3037 it’s not that easy. You can’t just move to the Netherlands just because you want to move
Work on getting your suburb better. Likely Strong Towns and others can help you.
Ya, where I'm at in the suburbs outside of Seattle, I can see new developments all over the place to make more mixed use walkable areas, but they are only just starting this in the last 5 to 10 years. The Netherlands started in the 1970's, so they are at least 4 decades ahead of us. There's still so much pent up demand for mixed use housing that any new apartments that get built are going to be astronomically expensive for quite some time. It's funny how I read so many comments about Amsterdam being so expensive, but I look at it and I see how cheap it is. I can even find a place that's 2/3 the price of the cheapest studio apartments in Seattle, but they have nicer bathrooms and an actual private kitchen.
@Connor Nielsen It is not COVID 19 but the fact that the USA closed the borders for European immigrants and European countries closed the borders to USA immigrants, and both to many others as well. COVID 19 does not help but we hope that it will be temporarily.
Impeccably presented! "Hartelijk dank!" Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in Palo Alto, California in the '60s and '70s. In 1971, I returned for the first time to the Netherlands after immigrating to the US in 1957. The experience enlightened and inspired me. I realised that I was very much Dutch, and I decided at 15 that I would return to live. In 2019, I retired, and left the UK (!) where I lived for 31 years. I now live in delightful Middelburg with its striking town centre and charming, mesmerising neighbourhoods. Although the Dutch in the last 50 years have replicated some of the worst American practices, their city centres teem with joyful shops, cafés, restaurants, and housing. I adore living here. I feel... alive and euphoric! Frankly, when I was a youngster, I found the towns and cities in the US effectively uninhabitable because they lacked character, charm, and walkability. Ubiquitous six lane roads and motorways turned me off. There was nothing to look at and enjoy. Middelburg, in that regard, is paradise. Am I in heaven?
I moved to Utrecht from the US. I feel like I am in heaven.
Places that look the same as everywhere, do lack _emotional anchorpoints_ as I call them. You need those special places where you can be at ease and in awe, in order to care for the area you live in. Happily my region has plenty historical buildings and enjoyable squares or even corners that fulfill this simple human need.
@@peterslegers6121 Hello Peter! Where do you live?
@@marcelmoulin3335 In the south of Limburg. (Those who've been stationed in Europe might know it as the tri-border area.)
Palo Alto is actually walkable. You can go from the uni to the Kipling Club, to the Garden Court Hotel, to Professorville, all very easily.
I lived in Dublin, Ireland for over 10 years in several neighbourhoods and in Ireland each neighbourhood has what they call a "main street". The main street is within walking distance and each main street has tipically a butchers, hair sallon, convenience store, liquor store, a bank, 1 or 2 restaurants and 1 or 2 pubs, some main streets have also a hardware store and the great majority are family businesses so you know the money will stay within the community.
You know that promising an average of 1.5 future videos for each video you make is....
Just as unsustainable as suburban finances.
But I like hearing from this random youtuber
Well you're in luck, because this random UA-camr will be making a whole playlist plagiarizing Strong Towns. 😂
@@NotJustBikes Nice.
The quality of your videos is really high. A lot of attention to detail. A joy to watch.
Random Acts of Canadian, perhaps?
I hate my life here in Canada. the housing market is seriously so messed up, everything is so expensive, there's no hope that i'll ever have a house and get ahead like my parents did, and it makes me so depressed :(
Great video! I wish more towns would act on this. My town did a similar study, came to the exact same conclusion, wrote solutions into their master plan and.... brought in more suburban development
USA: We don't care.
The lettuce comment intrigued me and my mind wandered off. I had to watch the video a second time. Why did she write that comment. Has she never eaten or tasted lettuce? Has lettuce a bad name in US? Are food standards so low in US that lettuce tastes unfamiliar? Isn’t she used to eat vegetables and was this her first time ever? Or did she decide to eat healthier from now on, so she didn’t pick out put aside the lettuce from the burrito or taco? Or did she just write it so someone like me would wonder about it? I’m still intrigued.
This is why I had to include it when I found the review. Why would lettuce not tasting funny even be an attribute worth mentioning? WHY, CYNTHIA, WHY?!
@@NotJustBikes I'm late to the party, but I will just say. I will not eat our lettuce.
My go to at taco johns in the taco burger with no lettuce. In my opinion the lettuce just takes away taste. Doesn't taste funny necessarily but it does taste better without
Uh you're over exaggerating. Lettuce is fine here lol
Maybe she meant that even the lettuce is sad there.
My fiancé and I recently moved to a small town where I can walk to the little family owned grocery to the bank to the post office to the home cooking restaurant and it feels so wildly different than when we lived in an apartment on the edge of the city....
Live in a small town in the US. 30 minute drive to major city. It's a massively different sense of community. It's all local business and everyone knows each other. We have like 3 restaurants and 1 bar, so everybody goes to the same places waves hello.
There are many places like this in the US, but if your focus is on being close to a major city versus finding a nice town near one, you will undoubtedly find the soulless suburbs here
This episode should be called: Even Europeans know Brainard sucks.
Hey, you can't say that. I'm from Minnesota dammit! Yeah it sucks, but Taco Johns isn't the reason!
You know he’s not European, right? He says it right in this video...
I don't suspect that Brainerd is any worse than any other American city of a similar size. Its downtown actually looks reasonably nice, too. Better than most of the downtown area of my hometown.
Yeah we've seen Fargo!
When I worked in Minnesota three years ago I took care of a kid from Brainerd, he was a real troublemaker XD I hope he has grown up, cause he was 13 yo.
No discussion of this is complete without a history of how American Auto companies intentionally pushed laws and policies that created the suburbs specifically to sell more cars.
Hell yeah! Keep the gravy train rolling!!!! I love the auto industry
What next? Clothing companies invented nakedness to sell clothing? GTFO
Ah yes, lobbying. AKA legal bribery.
I never understood why in US, they don't allow commercial properties mixed with residential. When living abroad, I loved the fact that I can walk to corner store to grab whatever I need. At the least, every corner of the block should be multi usage property.
Because for whatever reason Americans think Euclidian zoning is "smart".
@@taoliu3949 And I thought we Americans hate math...
@@AA_cowgomoo It's got nothing to do with math. The name refers to Euclid vs Ohio which was a case that determined it was legal for the government to tell you what you can/cannot do with your property.
Let’s not forget about the post-1980s American maxim of “taxation is theft,” wherein the whole point of urban development is to starve municipalities and enrich a select few development interests.
Yeah, when you're actively bulldozing things and building developments that bring in *less* tax revenue than what you bulldozed, it definitely does not help that your taxes are already way too low as it is.
But part of the problem is that the US has built so many sprawling infrastructure miles per person that the tax rate would have to be insanely high to cover it all - even if Americans *didn't* think "tax" was a four-letter word.
@@NotJustBikes were the buildings that they bulldozed empty? or was it basically a carbon copy of the full lot to the left and they booted the businesses out?
A lot of dutch people also think “taxation is theft,” And apparently think that roads are some kind of plants, and if there are holes in the road, it closes at night
@@JacobBax I think this particular thought disease was invented and transmitted by America, starting in the 1980s. Many of us feel it's our patriotic duty to pay our taxes.
@Jacob Bax
@Bill Scurry
Seeing the nice bridges and roads BicycleDutch shows us every week, I don't mind paying taxes.
I fully understand it takes money to live in a nice environment, to have good healthcare, and to have a warm bed even when you didn't work the last 3 years. And the dutch AOW is of a whole other level than 'social security' in the USA.
So yes, it takes money to have all these goodies. You may call them taxes, it's just a name for the money needed to live a good life, collectively. (Or is this socialism already ?)
There are some movements afoot to change this. In metro Atlanta, there are mixed use developments being built. The goal is to establish live/work/play communities. The movement is slow to catch on though. Even in my county in the outskirts of the metro there has been a boom in new housing along with commercial development.
Your right, although this comes with another issue: these mixed developments are being built in class and racially stratified parts of town, where only the (white) middle class and rich can afford them. Atlanta in particular is being hard hit by racial and class based gentrification. There's also areas in Florida being built to adhere to the same concept, but they are either strictly for seniors and/or middle to upper class families. For older downtown areas that do happen to allow travel by foot, they are slowly being gentrified as the poor and routinely BIPOC are pushed, ironically enough, to the suburbs or areas with less transportation access.
Honestly, it's all a giant clusterfuck that won't be improved if even our efforts to improve them fall along racial and class lines.
@@intenebrisveritas You do realize white is a color, right? You act like we are subhuman while acting like anyone non-white is a god among us. You racist leftietards are strange cult.
Atlanta in general is spared the fate of "we'll have to tear down what's here to start over again" that you'll see in somewhere like Houston because it's so sparsely developed. And I say that as an Atlantan. Lots of room to grow inwards, if the economic opportunities are there.
I've done construction oversight work near the Brainerd example. That Taco John's gave me an upset tummy. It's really neat to have such a familiar example of this.
When I went to school for civil engineering, I was taught hyper car centric designs were not only the right choice but the only choice. I hope soon that this changes, but I fear for the future at this point.
Thanks for making cool videos.
Thanks for this video. Whenever I tell my parents that America is a bit of a wasteland they say I sound like a euro snob so I showed them this series to prove them wrong. So I want to say thank you!
What did you're parents said after watching these video's?
Many years ago, I learned that my parents had been thinking about moving to the US.
Since UA-cam, I love them more than ever, that it has remained just thinking.
My parents said that I had a point :) also if it would help you for me to speak in Dutch I can
If you live in a place like I do though it is a boring and not very appealing place, filled with polluted highways
@@hankleupen2775 I live in the netherlands. In a city of 35.000 and I have 3 big groserie stores with in a 10 minutes bike ride, and a more expancive one in a 5 minute walk.
And after 65 years this is also a boring place, but to some people it looks like a fairytale.
Is my english that bad :-)) ?
Jacob Bax that is a really good point, however other things like how the Netherlands makes energy has me intrigued, and it would shock everyone if the us did something like that
Loving this series.
Channel*
As a native of a major east coast city, I find it strange whenever I visit my out of town friends. The fact that you simply don't have personhood without a car is alien as hell to me. Even though I have no familiarity with how infrastructure works, I just didn't understand how a place can operate like that. Now watching this video, it's amazing to find that they're not commercially viable, and in a strange way knowing this makes my gut feeling about them feel vindicated.
Love your videos. However, I'm a bit concerned that viewers may end up believing that all (western) European cities are urban planning utopia.
In my limited experience in Europe, it seems that many historical town centres been emptied out, gentrified and globalized to appeal to the rich and to tourists (pre-covid). Neither is Europe immune to the trend towards suburbanization.
There’s a difference between suburbanization and gentrification, but they both have a similar end result. One point not really touched on in the video is aside from tax value per acre, the revenue remaining in the immediate community is still much higher for the old style of planning. People own those shops. They love around the corner. They shop at the other shops and feed their families from the money they make. While suburbanization removes that almost entirely, so does gentrification. Displacing the current population by inflating the revenue value required for that quality of life is really not much different than local money going into big corporate pockets. Yuppies move their herbal coffee shop into the decrepit storefront that used to be a Dominican restaurant, using their parents’ money up front, and proceed to not reinvest that money into their immediate community, thus raising the value that actual locals need to produce in order to stay afloat. If your only coffee shop in your neighborhood is charging $10 for a cup of coffee, and that owner isn’t buying the product or service you sell, you’ve been gentrified. I’ve watched it happen to New York, and your comment makes me very sad to learn it’s happening in Europe as well. I figured it was only an American issue.
If Europe's also trending the same way, there could be rooms for potential in such an experiment. There are disadvantages in a city after all like all types of things.
As this channel said, it's only been several decades of its development, the "proven" city development that was made for countless years may have been like that in its infancy. In my observation, the current design of suburbs do look like it has major flaws, but then, are we gonna just abandon it altogether without trying to make it better in the future?
Why did suburbs existed in the first place, bc we can
@@ElkaPME It’s not that suburbs are bad because they are suburbs, it’s those *suburbs* that are unwalkable and too car dependent that we are roasting.
Definitely seen the copy-paste suburban neighbourhouds get more prominent in Europe. even though its still possible to walk to shops
Good point. I’m from the Netherlands and in big cities there is a trend of some old neighbourhoods being gentrified, the original residents being forced to move out of their social housing to areas further away. It’s a big issue.
EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS. LITERALLY EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS. I'm literally going to quote this video when I sit down with my councillor here in Thunder Bay next week...
Every town and city in the US and Canada needs to read and understand Strong Towns. We can still have suburbs, but we need to build them properly, so that future generations can benefit from them as well, and we don't saddle them with debt.
Thunder Bay has good "bones": it needs to build on the productive places it already has.
@@NotJustBikes Thunder Bay has two strong downtowns that don't have to change - there is just a lot of quick fill inbetween that I think should be replaced with mid-density urban spaces before the city expands its footprint. There is no reason we can't grow - while keeping everyone no more than 10 minutes from nature.
I agree. Thunder Bay could be a wonderful town if it was built properly. I enjoyed it there, in the few days I visited (while staying downtown). It's quite walkable in places.
Good luck with Victoriaville. From what I can tell, no one has any idea how to fix that problem.
I live close to Westgate and the only thing I've ever walked to is a mailbox or a park.
At least I now have a bicycle route across the whole city with mostly protected crossings.
@@coast2coast00
I'm willing to give downtown Fort William a chance post-Victoriaville! It used to be bumpin' (we're talking like the '20s here)... But I've got a feeling that Thunder Bay has to build up and not out - and the best way to do that is to give our downtowns a facelift.
I don't know how old you are - but even if you can remember downtown Port Arthur back in like 2005 - we've come a LONG way.
Ive seen this and it's so much better. Seeing a small library turn into a cafe, into a gym. It was extremely flexible. Meanwhile going to downtown there is a huge Walmart sized buildings that have been abandoned since i was 8. Over a decade and nothing has changed
"The lettuce didn't even taste funny"
The American standards for food are so low! 😰💀💀💀
Most Americans do not eat lettuce of any quality.
@@safe-keeper1042 And you get way more for what you pay for the states.
I have a feeling she thought cilatro was bad lettuce and this place gave her actual lettuce
4 stars too. People here rave about bars or restaurants that serve cheap beer and microwaved food as a 5 star venue all the time.
And u haven't been to south america
It can be dangerous to walk in the suburbs. Car drivers have no respect and there's no one else walking around to help when drivers insult or run into a pedestrian.
I’ve been there, so sad that I literally have to choose what time of day to walk to avoid cars, I do it now cause I nearly got run over by someone returning home from work who I guess was angry and flew into there driveway at 40kph and skimmed me and honked at me as if it was my fault I hate this shit
Crazy how I can buy a phone that has a folding screen but I can’t walk home safe lol what a world
It's funny because most driver's ed often teaches their students that pedestrians have the right-of-way, yet that statement is no longer true after they get their driver's license.
@@emiliofernandez7117 Whenever me or my family walk in my neighborhood and if there is a car coming, we have to get off the road and move to the grass. It makes it very clear that the neighborhood is for the car and not for the pedestrian.
It's more dangerous to walk in City streets than Suburb streets.
great point about the fragility of towns with big box stores vs. many small stores
"The lettuce didn't even taste funny" Oh good. XD
no wonder they gave them 4 stars, high praise indeed
@@dv7533 And what an endorsement! I would be pleased and delighted to taste the lettuce myself.
Most fast food taco places have funny tasting lettuce I personally find, maybe its a gene I have. Most of it tastes strongly/nauseatingly like cleaning chemicals.
Wacky and uncharacteristic lettuce
what's incredibly interesting about this is that North American "suburban big house dream" has been exported around the world as well to a lot of other countries
They see this process as "development", generating reverse gentrification, neglecting ready infrastructure, while not really having an alternative that is livable outside highways
The thing to consider though in these countries is also population growth, even though it is quite dense and small, the Netherlands still has much more manageable population size compared to especially developing countries
@Pro Tengu Meanwhile in the Netherlands they live a much better and happier life.
I hate seeing people say... "look at this!!! It works in this country we should use it in america!!!" meanwhile they fail to mention that country has the population of a single american town and cant compare.
@@matthewhetes9965 You also fail to mention that the US is the wealthiest nation in the world, but the only to not provide basic needs for it's citizens which just about every other developed country does, and the only developed country without high speed rail, and crumbling infrastructure.
Edit: not to mention the US has been spending trillions of dollars in a war in Afghanistan, and giving tax cuts to wealthy corporations. There's no excuse. If you can afford to waste money in a pointless war for 20 years while giving free money to corporation's, then there's no excuse why that money couldn't have been invested at home on your own people and infrastructure.
Your not smart.
But this sort of phenomenon has been going on for centuries, but not as the result of a sense of freedom, but rather a stigma. In the Middle Ages, the people of the cities did not welcome people such as Jews and executioners into their cities, so they all had to congregate outside of them.
This is a major thing I didn't even realize was happening and yet of course it was so obvious. One massive big box store taking up the space of fifty smaller stores would of course generate less for the city. Of course it would have a much bigger economic impact if it went out of business compared to twenty of those fifty smaller stores going under... But it's something I had never thought about because being from the US, this is normal. This is all I've seen and all I've known for most of my life.
It effects jobs in the area as well. One store with, let's say 150 employees versus fifty stores with six employees each. Which one is providing more jobs, which one is generating more for the economy? It's so obvious.
Your estimate for big box stores if widely off base. And smaller mom and pop stores have fewer employees too. And smaller stores can provide less service. 50 stores with 50 cashiers compared to 1 big box with 5 cashiers. that's 45 people wo can be employed on other more productive work.
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam... Here's to hoping that it can become NEW New Amsterdam with more bicycle infrastructure.
Amsterdan is getting close to NY in terms of cost of housing insanity. Certain areas of Rotterdam look like the Bronx in the 70's....
I've finally caught up binge watching all your content, and now, all I can do is hit that bell button and wait for more content. I love this channel. It's opened my eyes to realize how many decades behind anywhere in the US is compared to The Netherlands' walkability.
Uk and netherlands are the most USA like countries in Europeo. Most of people there live in houses, no flats.
@@Darknight73457 Maybe that's part of what initially triggered my process of idealizing the Netherlands in my head in the first place. There's a hint of familiarity, and yet it still seems to resolve many of the problems that frustrate me in the US.
The UK might have had my interest if they weren't so politically divided and Brexit didn't happen. I much prefer the proportion representation system that the Netherlands has where it doesn't matter where you live. You have a large amount of political parties to choose from that more closely represents your views, and there's less frustration of having to vote for the "lesser evil." You just get your candidate in, and you can be satisfied that you did your part, and you can let them do the negotiations and coalition forming for you.
I could go on, but this is already going on for long enough. I don't even mind if no one reads this fully. Sometimes it just helps me to type out my thoughts.
@@ex0stasis72 Uk has (in my opinion) a disgusting unrepresentative political system. Nigel Farage's party got the 15% in an election and it only got 1 MP. Canada, USA and other anglosaxon countries are bipartidist states de facto.
I like the dutch system, but maybe it's too much atomizated. Every party can gets representation with a 1% of vote and that's too much chaotic then.
Another bad thing of north european countries is the weather. I prefer to live in the corrupt south Europe because of weather and other things like social life, food quality, and incredible landscapes (In holland, belgium or England you don´t have real forrests or mountains).
If I were an american triying to emigrate to Europe I would choose Austria. The problem is the language.
"Istanbul (not Constantinople)"
Ya know, you didn't need to hurt me like that... but you sure wanted it.
Perhaps some of the most heartbreaking results from this suburban expansion is the construction of freeways that destroyed neighbourhoods. Montreal, like most North American cities, got into a lot of urban sprawl with lots of car-dependent neighbourhoods with little to no transit. Freeways, like the Decarie, Metropolitan, and the A-720, destroyed many neighbourhoods and caused a significant increase in air pollution and car traffic, year by year. They even considered bulldozing Old Montreal to make way for a new freeway, but due to protests, it was moved slightly north into a tunnel. Nevertheless, lots of historic buildings in downtown Montreal were demolished to make way for ugly concrete buildings (like the Quebec district court just beside old Montreal).
Now, don't let Montreal's beautiful European architecture in downtown fool you into thinking that Montreal is a transit-friendly city, because it's not. The car-dependent suburbs has had a hugely negative impact on downtown, and old Montreal, like many European cities that are very walkable on foot, actually allows cars to drive onto the cobblestone streets, and the intersections around the Notre-Dame Basilica has become some of the most dangerous intersections in the city, simply because the streets there were designed for 18th century pedestrian traffic, and because of that, few people would expect lots of cars to drive into Old Montreal. It's absolutely disgusting that the city doesn't ban cars there.
In many North American cities with car-dependent suburbs, that helped the population develop a very strong car culture and anti-transit culture, and Montreal is no exception. In fact, the car culture in Montreal is particularly strong, and this was evident when proposals to ban cars from Sainte-Catherine street were published, and huge numbers of car-loving masochists were crying out loud protesting the reduction of parking space and the loss of revenue businesses there could suffer. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Banning cars from Ste-Catherine would significantly help businesses there as they depend much on foot traffic, rather than vehicular traffic, and a ban on cars significantly improves pedestrian safety and reduce air pollution. The narrow lanes of Ste-Catherine often results in traffic jams that causes traffic to spend at least 1 hour to travel a kilometre. And the car culture in Montreal has been equally vocal against transit expansion: the REM, a new automated subway system under construction, has seen its fair share of car-loving masochists protesting against the REM, in addition to riders on the Deux-Montagnes line as well, because they too love the car and prefer a commuter train that runs once an hour rather than a subway train that runs every 2 minutes.
And finally, if you don't get why Montreal isn't a transit-friendly city, consider these facts:
* Only 10/68 stations have elevators for wheelchairs. In Toronto, 47/75 are. In Vancouver, 100% are.
* Metro trains run 4 minutes apart on rush hours, and 8-20 minutes at other times. On Vancouver's SkyTrain, frequencies are 90 seconds and 4 minutes respectively. In Toronto, 2 minutes and 6 minutes respectively.
* Buses are poorly maintained, never on time, and always gets stuck in traffic. Like Dallas but unlike Amsterdam, Montreal has zero traffic calming, and the city has done nothing to reduce cars on the road. In much of the suburbs, like the West Island, there are only a handful of bus routes that run only one bus per hour, even during the rush hour!
* Almost non-existent transportation to the airport. Most people drive or take a taxi there, because the only bus that goes there is an extremely overpriced bus that takes 90 minutes to get to downtown while stuck in traffic, and most buses in Montreal don't have air conditioning, have very few hard seats, and almost no suspension because the STM wanted to reduce costs in an inefficient way. In Toronto and Vancouver, they both have a comfortable, quick, affordable, and reliable train to the airport in under 30 minutes.
The bus from the airport to DT takes around 45 minutes and price is 10$, quite reasonable. But I agree with the rest. I lived downtown, near McGill, and I found public transit great (I love MTL subway, the stations are very unique) until I had to go outside downtown. There, it's a public transit no man's land. You only have unreliable buses for which you have to wait under extreme temperatures, something nobody wants to experience. Montreal is a great city for the culture, the food, its people but I don't my self living there because of that. I would prefer living in Vancouver or Calgary (public transit there sucks but you know what to expect lol and traffic is decent).
these videos will trigger many Americans, but you are right. I grew up in suburbia and I dont think I will live in a place like this as an adult, its just so boring.
It blows my mind that people *desire* to live in car-dependent suburbs. There's not enough Xanax in the world that would make me live there again
sounds like to me your lived in a boring area, no offense
@@sirpieman300 Well duh, when you grow up in a suburb that's separated from any cafes, pubs, stores, barbers, grocery stores, etc, due to zoning laws, there's no sense of community, so no shit it's boring. Did you watch the video?
@@ryanscott6578 Yea i did, and to me, none of those examples he showed of " suburban hell" were suburbs in my opinion, at least not where I live here in us. But perhaps what I think of the suburbs isn't really what qualifies as suburbs
Just come to some French suburb ghetto commie block, you won't be bored.
I love how "soulcrushingly sterile" is not enough to give the idea of how bad urban planning in the US is
My supermarket is 500m away, my job 4 subway stations…
Im 35 and have never owned a car..
Yes, I’m from Europe
0:42 Istanbul (not Constantinople), thanks for this visual gag, I really liked it
They might be giants is seeping through this channel as well
I dont get the joke. It seems very loaded political wise.
@@rutgerb it is not political at all, it is just a song
@@Aprill264 ok thx for the clarification, I dont know the song. But I do know its political loaded.
@@rutgerb it's not politically loaded when you know the song by They might be giants.
"why they changed it I can't say, people just liked it better this way"
Thankfully I live in a suburb that's somewhat walk friendly. My biggest issue is that all the jobs are mainly low paying. You can't have a job and enjoy a decent lifestyle in the same town in most cases. Unless you own a string of businesses or are high up in certain company, majority of people living in suburbs have to commute to another town, or more likely, get a job in the city to support their lifestyle in the suburbs.
I really wish I had stores, restaurants etc. in walking distance of my home.
I literally need to get a car and a license in order to go anywhere.
Thank you so much for recommending the book Strong Towns and visualizing it so effectively here! This was one of those rare fascinating books that taught me something relevant about an important topic I have never really thought about before. I am grateful to live in a walkable European city (which I totally took for granted until now)
I started with the 4th episode in my recommended and after watching 1 I'm now at 2 and I gotta say it; The Untied States of America really dropped the ball, this place just doesn't feel like more of dump spiritually, it's actually becoming a dump by squandering it's money.
I always love watching your videos! They are fun and I learn a lot. Thank you for making them!
Thank you for making this video. I'm so glad that people are talking about this. America does not have to be this ugly or depressing. We need to retain undeveloped land and get rid of suburban style development.
🤡🤡🤡
It's surreal that this whole series of vids is based off of an organization in my backyard. having spent a good chunk of my life growing up in MN and currently still living here, I'm both proud to know that this organization is local to my area and also pretty distraught knowing just how bad we have it. a lot of the issues that both you and strong towns bring up are things i've always despised about the small towns i grew up in here & around the country, but never really had language for. it wasn't until college that i got to see the cities & fall in love with the denser, more navigable and lively style of living & started to hear about the concepts of transit, city planning, etc., but it's been research like this that has really piqued my interest. so thanks for putting it back on my mind. kinda surreal to think that a lot of this knowledge is coming out of a group based in the small town i used to spend many summer weeks in at a local camp. i've spent a summer interning for the city of minneapolis as an engineer, but i think i am only now slowly starting to really get passionate about this stuff. would be cool if maybe one day in my lifetime i saw some serious change around here for the better when it comes to infrastructure & planning...
watching this channel after growing up in a suburban cul-de-sac has been pretty enlightening, I've always known there's something that feels wrong about living here, but I've never really been able to put a finger on what or how to change things to feel better. Turns out, putting all of the people on the opposite side of the city from where they want to be doesn't actually make as much sense as just naturally spreading out areas around. Expand the city, don't make suburbs.
As a kid, I always wanted to live 'The American dream'. Now, I am grateful for *not* living in the US or Canada.
Haha right? Pop culture & media really inflated my young impression of the US
My American dream is to manage to live the live style I want (little driving, walking more, no lawn) despite of the economy and housing industry might want me to do
We are glad you're not here too!
@Karym Eliya I agree with a lot of what you all said about the US. I am very thankful for the sacrifice of previous generations and the freedoms that we have, but I don’t know that I can live here for the rest of my life. I am living a decent life, but for some reason quality of life feels low. I hope to visit some European countries, especially The Netherlands, soon to experience them.
LMAO. Not 1st world? Please explain.
i'm dutch, we also have our share of failed developments, experiments, etc. and we don't learn. I live in Utrecht, and we're repeating the same mistakes in Leidsche Rijn in the 2000's as we did in IJsselsteijn and Nieuwegein in the 80's... suburbia, with no business life around it. its just a dead area.
Hmm interesting, my American suburban neighborhood has restaurants, grocery stores and gas stations within a 1km radius
@@MainMite06 I do also, but the problem I'm assuming you also have is that it's a pain to walk to them - you have to cross very dangerous roads and you look homeless to the point where you will do nothing but drive there
I mostly agree but the idea that somehow European cities were deliberately designed for sensible use is laughable. Hausman plowed through Paris in the later 1800s building huge boulevards to remove tight warrens of streets. Copenhagen wasn’t always bike friendly. This was the result of a deliberate policy shift in the 1970s
> the idea that somehow European cities were deliberately designed for sensible use is laughable [...] Copenhagen wasn’t always bike friendly. This was the result of a deliberate policy shift in the 1970s
So what you're saying is Copenhagen was not always bike friendly and was deliberately designed for bike friendliness?
Lmao
As someone who grew up in and around Brattleboro, the town at 6:45, I found the inclusion hilarious in that I was JUST talking about how Bratt is actually a pretty nice town in regards to the Strong Towns setup this morning! It's neat to see our little Vermont town pointed out, a bit startling too! It's actually a great example of exactly what you're talking about in that just out of frame to the left is a shop that was once a bookstore, then a hobby shop, then a cafe, then a burger joint, and is now a taco shop. Exactly the flexible location you're talking about!
Your subtle They Might Be Giants reference was appreciated
With traditional development no car is needed. It is so liberating to not have a car. Even in November in Stockholm, I can still ride my bike and do what I need to do. If I had to I can use public transportation or get a taxi.
In Jakarta, there are whole suburban towns built by private developers, and for me, they often look the same, big roads, lots of greenery, and low rise housing came in the form of gated communities. Often they advertised travel time from the nearest highway or promote a “foreign” lifestyle
Yep. With nonsensical landmark such as a big clock or... 7 wonders of the world. Uh oh, dont forget a big ass mall where everyone from nearby town visit
Hey! Real estate finance guy here. While I agree with you wholeheartedly that suburbs are a terrible way to plan cities, @5:00 you mention that the Taco John's building will only decrease in value from here. However, this is far from true. Real estate value generally appreciate over time regardless of where they are located. This is why that 1920s building can be worth $1+ million today. It wasn't worth anything close to a million bucks in the 1920s. For for-rent commercial space, like the Taco John's site and the old 1920s group of buildings, the property value is primarily based on how much income it makes from the tenants (rent less expenses = income. income/capitalization rate = value). In this case, it appears that the 1920s building is quite a bit larger than the Taco John's, thus likely having higher income and higher value.
Anyway, my only point is that you can't assume that property values do nothing but depreciate. Real estate is not a depreciating asset. This might help you rethink these city insolvency issues, as well. As values increase, so do taxes.
Love your channel!
I think in that sentence he is not referring to land value (because he's comparing it to a plot of same size and practically same location), he is talking about the value of the actual building (old cheap constructs vs new recently built construct), which is why he later says "beginning of life" vs "end of life". The building does decrease in value until maintenance is performed.
@@VictorChavesVVBC And he totally ignores number of customers satisfied by the business in his analysis.
You should name the videos in which you complain about American suburbia “literally just cars”
Or not, but it would be pretty funny
I still have PTSD from those 16 lane highways in the Down-Thompon-Paradox episode. Imagine having a canyon like that between your residential buildings, basically as your regular street.
I would add to the other incorrect uses of 'literally'.
@@Dark__Thoughts I live near a 26 lane freeway, the Katy Freeway, in Texas. The greater Houston area is a such a suburban sprawl nightmare that the band Arcade Fire made an entire award-winning album about how terrible it is.
@@crispyglovehave you seen this monstrosity? www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
@@BramHeerebout I have seen that. It's sad that they've dumbed dictionaries down to the point of re-defining words because people are too ignorant.
We had a hotel in the city center of Miami last year, but for anything to eat or going out we had to take the car to the mall in the outskirts of the city. Everywhere in Europe you go to the city center for fun in the USA you have to leave the city center.
Lightly touched upon it in the video but yeah, small compact stores are easy to replace or change over. Some time it's as simple as changing the sign out front to go from a Barber Shop to nail Salon. However the big box stores tend to love to have their custom designed buildings and parking lots. They won't just take over another stores spot. Thus when that Kmart or Walmart shuts down that lot stays empty for years, if it ever gets replaced. Because not only do companies only want their own design for a building, it's so big and sold as a package no small business could afford to buy just part of it.
7:06 My guy found a parking lot were almost all of the cars are red, white, or blue cars. I can't I literally can't.
It's funny yet awesome how based this channel is. Your videos do an excellent job at articulating the weirdness I see with infrastructure here in the US and how it can be better. I’m not a civil engineer, but these videos are always interesting to watch.
You opened my eyes to the potential of the old and small "downtown" areas.