> We need to value density as it allows for more compact living.
rack em and stack em, eh?
recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.
The data shows correlation not causation. Maybe people in urban centers on a whole would be more happy if there was better public transit, and thus, less traffic congestion. Or maybe people in urban areas would be happier if there was a better balance between real estate supply and demand such that price curve wasn't so steep as one gets closer in? Or maybe it's that concentrated poverty in big cities drags the happiness index down? Who knows, it's probably some combination of all of those things.
I know that when I hear people complain about living in the DC Metro area, the two complaints are traffic and real estate prices. We have the metro but it is literally teetering on crisis as they had to shut the whole system down for a day recently. Improving the operation of metro should be a very high priority for the DC, MD, and VA governments, and the feds for that matter.
> recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.
Anecdata, but that one year I lived in suburbia was terrible from just about every perspective I care about. Couldn't even walk to the corner store to grab milk because there was no such thing as a corner store. Wanna go party in the evening? City is an hour train ride away. Terrible. Wanna grab drinks somewhere close? Choice of 3 bars. Ugh. Wanna party past 10pm? Can't. Everything closed. (this was in the US)
As for rural ... I have a lot of family who comes from rural lands. They all fled into the cities as soon as they were old enough to do so. The infrastructure to support modern life just isn't there in ruralandia. Even my grandparents moved from super rural to slightly less rural with the wave of post-ww2 modernization in the 50's. (this was in Europe)
I'm probably the odd one out here, though. I will never understand the American fetishization of suburbia. Even now I keep arguing with my girlfriend (grew up in US) cause she wants to move from SoMa to the more outskirt parts of SF like Portrero.
Never is a strong word. Maybe if I ever have kids the same sort of salmon-like instinct that Americans have will kick in and I too will want to move back to my spawning grounds.
edit: Actually, this might be cultural. As a European, I think that the closer you live to downtown, the higher your social status. This is a bias that is hard for me to escape even though in the US the social signal is inverted.
> Wanna grab drinks somewhere close? Choice of 3 bars.
And then you either leave your car there, and pay more to take a cab home, and then back again in the morning to pick the car up - or risk driving drunk.
Exactly. I live in a big city. It's already dense enough that transit congestion is a major problem. One coworker bought a house a couple of years ago, and in the last year told me that his commute essentially doubled.
Further increasing the density of my city (especially if we do it before putting adequate transit in place to prevent congestion from becoming worse) is not something that I want to happen. Why would I vote for it? I'm happy for density to stay at the same level it's at now, or only gradually increase. I haven't heard a convincing argument for why I should be in favor of increasing density at more than a relatively slow rate.
Cities should look after their current residents. If the residents don't want density to increase, then who is to say that's the wrong policy?
It's a factor of poor public transit. Imagine walking out of your house, walking 3 minutes to the nearest bus stop, waiting at most 5 minutes for the next bus, and then not worrying about any congestion until you're at work.
If you miss the bus, the next one will be there in 10 minutes. If you don't want to wait for 10 minutes, another bus that will take a slightly different route and cause you to walk an extra 7 minutes from bus stop to your destination, will be there in 3 minutes.
Unfortunately most Americans have never experienced anything close to that level of public transit, and cannot imagine cities functioning like that.
Toronto has a transit system that works like you describe (~10 minute waits), however, most still find it easily worth $600 a month to drive a car so you don't have to spend 20 minutes every day outside in -30 weather walking and waiting for transit.
Furthermore, even if you wanted to take transit occasionally, it's not worth it because the fare ($3 one-way) is almost always more than the marginal cost of driving (gas).
Then you have the signaling aspect (there's a perception that only poor people take the bus).
I don't think anything will change unless car ownership triples or more in cost.
Yeah, Toronto is much better than most North American cities, but it's not perfect by any means, at least if one is to believe r/toronto. :)
Regarding car ownership, yes, you can always tax car registrations and gasoline way higher and spend the extra money to add more frequent service, retrofit car lanes into bus-only lanes/streets, add bike lanes, and lower fares.
The data show no such thing. Correlation != causation.
People self-select where they live. It could easily be that happy people choose to live in the country instead of the city, or people in cities have more stressful jobs, etc
That might be true. However, suburban living comes at a cost that is highly subsidized. The cost of infrastructure per person in the suburbs is much higher than in a dense city. There is just so much more roads and pipes and cables per person. However, the cost gets carried by everyone evenly. If that cost had to be paid by the people in the suburbs (like me) than living there would all the sudden be quite a bit less attractive. This was covered in a great episode of Econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html
The study you cite didn't bother surveying or measuring anything non-American. Americans show the correlation you've described because Americans are indoctrinated to dislike cities and in fact to restructure cities into low-quality-of-life settings, even while everyone else on the planet understands just fine how to live happily in cities.
I'm going to speculate wildly, and I have no basis for these assertions. If any of this is objectively wrong, please correct me.
1. Easier access to firearms, and other suicide methods. Gun ownership in rural areas is higher than in cities, and I'd wager that gun suicides by gun are a lot more likely to succeed than other methods (e.g., jumping off a building.)
2. People in rural areas may socialize less, and may have less of a support network. I live in New York, and if I want to see my friends after work, it's an extra 5 minutes on the train for us, and an easy way to get home after having a few rounds at the bar. If I were back in Dallas, it might be 45 minutes out of my way in traffic, and it would be much more difficult to get home and then back to work again if I couldn't drive my car home. In a more isolated area, your friends might live two hours from you, or two states over.
3. Some suicide attempts are actually cries for help, and in a dense city, more people may notice that cry.
rack em and stack em, eh?
recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all.
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673
We can promote more "compact living" but the data shows it degrades human happiness.