There's no reason you should need to drive for that kind of stuff. Sure, it takes 5 minutes, but it's worse for your health, the environment, your wallet, and your morale.
Sure, and a suburbanite could bike 10-15 minutes there instead of driving. This isn't really a problem with suburbs. Grocery stores are incredibly common there, probably moreso than urban areas.
Unless you live in the US with its Euclidean Zoning laws which prohibit mixing land use types in a lot of the country. Groceries are commercial use, and so have to go in commercial developments. Plus the big box stores have killed off most of the small grocers, so you have to go to the strip mall on the edge of town.
This. Have no clue where these people are living, probably in proximity to a larger city, but everywhere I've ever lived (mostly smalltown shitsville suburban america), your options are maybe a corner store that has your bare essentials, at an insane markup (mostly, I suspect, in order to exploit people who don't own a car, forgot something on their way to the grocery, whatever. Capitalize on proximity.), or like, a 20 minute drive to the grocery store. 20 minutes both ways, plus the time you spend in the store, and parking, and traffic. That's probably like an hour out of your day, at the least. Probably more, since you're usually getting all your week's worth of groceries at once, since you wanna minmax your time.
Being in a commercial district and not an industrial one, and, being as most people drive their cars everywhere, and everything tends to be spread out to meet parking minimums, you probably don't end up close enough to the grocery store to pick up stuff on your way back from most of the other things you're gonna be doing. It all leads to more dedicated trips where you want to plan out more thoroughly what you're buying and what you're eating through the whole week, there's not a lot of spontaneity there. Even plan out what you're doing for fun, which I think is kind of antithetical to the idea of having fun.
I have never lived in a place where all of this wasn't the case.
I never said you should. Only that the above in no way describes the majority experience. It's really not that stressful in the least bit. It's a 10 minute experience with an extra wide parking spot for your f150 at one of the dozens of choices you'll have to grab your eggs.
I am particularly lucky in that I could go to Wegmans or one of several farms within that 10 minute time frame.
It's far closer to my hometown experience than what you describe.
I know of 2 grocery stores there (the other half of that town is a mystery to me, probably a couple more there but it was 10 minutes just to get over the bridge, 40+ minutes in the summer, so I never went there), and they got their first supermarket in a decade about 5 years ago now, after the previous one closed 10 years before. For a town of 30,000.
Granted, it's a summer vacation town, so it's like 60% rich people's summer homes, but everybody I've talked to who's lived in a summer town has described more or less the same experiences that I had growing up.
When I lived there, it was a 5-7 minute drive to the closest grocery, where you could pay tourist prices, or 20 minutes to that new supermarket. Your other option was to drive to the next town over or 30 minutes by highway in the other direction.
I visited the US once for a week. Visited Walmart exactly once, and Wegmans every other time. Wegmans blows even my European expectations for a grocery store out of the water.
They are pricy but my wife is celiac and they take their allergen labeling very seriously and importantly consistently. It's so easy to find GF on the labels for canned goods and such.
Okay, that's still a similar effort. And I don't disagree the preferred approach. The above is absurd though. If anything it describes a more rural experience and still quite exaggerated IMO.
The above is fantasy circle jerk material. Meme better and have a basis of truth. Those are the best memes.
If I didn't have to dox myself for that I'd gladly go out and record my way to the store. Just because you can't have basic necessities over there across the pond it doesn't mean everyone is going out of their way to lie for magic internet points.
Yeah, realistically this hypothetical person just grabbed eggs while they were at the Wawa. Nobody goes on a whole ass Costco run when they were already making dinner just for fucking eggs.
No one is going to supermarket like Costco. Ever heard of corner shops/convenience shops? Those are right next to or on ground floor of apartment buildings.
Honestly? Walking 95 meters to the grocery store is way less effort than getting in the car, putting on your seat belt, starting the car, driving off, and parking.
I lived 300 meters from a small grocery store and a 5 minute drive from a bigger one. I almost never went to the bigger one even though it had a better selection of food.
Yeah I agree that car dependent suburbs are a problem and car brainedness is an issue in North America, but these fake stories are kind of laughable.
Ive lived in suburbs and cities all over NY state and this story is funny. I'd probably be able to get to like 3 or 4 regional groceries (not cosco) in 5-10 minutes or to a gas station with good prices on eggs and milk in 2-5 minutes. Ive been to orlando so I know the OP isnt entirely untrue, but Ive lived in plenty of places where I'd be there and back again before the city guy gets to the bottom of the elevator/stairs. Also the corner bodega is almost definitely going to be more expensive.
Again I agree car dependency is bad, but this whole thing is silly.
I'm in a rural town in the USA and I have all these options available. 5 minutes away from grocery stores and restaurants, fresh produce and eggs growing in my own backyard. Room for my kids and pets to roam and no HOA and even low amounts of traffic to deal with.
This was definitely something I didn't realize was a thing until I moved into a far more non-car dependent suburb. I grew up in suburban sprawl so bad it would literally take you half an hour to foot just to leave the neighborhood. It's not nearly as good as some of the places I've stayed in Europe, but it was eye opening to say the least.
You should try an English suburb. The one I used to be in had a couple doctor's surgeries and everything. On a main road that leads into the city centre too.
The next one had a whole shopping centre just to itself.
In a proper streetcar suburb there should be a supermarket at the tram stop. Also daycare and small primary school, a hair stylist, a GP office, and a restaurant/takeout. Parcel pickup. You only take the tram if you need to go somewhere that has a larger catchment area than a tram stop and especially the supermarket and takeout should be directly at the tram stop so that commuters can grab something on their way home, the rest can be a bit more distributed. One tram stop might have a clothing store, another a shoe store.
Have plenty of bike parking that doubles the radius for the catchment area. housing density should gradually fall off from the tram stop outwards, you can e.g. have a couple of 8-storey blocks around the tram stops with a quasi-urban feel surrounded by 3-5 storeys interspersed with football pitches and greenery and playgrounds, then terraced homes, then finally single-family homes. As to street design: Plenty of cul-de-sacs and traffic calming, make sure that the cul-de-sacs are only for cars, bikes can continue on (you don't need separate bike infrastructure in traffic-calmed areas), also plenty of small paths cutting through everything so kids can visit friends living away 100m without you having to get on a highway first.
Small towns can eventually turn into suburbs... In my area, most suburbs were founded in the 1600's, later became incorporated into a town, and later into a city. It's proximity to a major nearby city makes it a suburb.
Sure, there are inconveniences with living in the suburbs, but there are some positives. A dollar typically goes further than in the city, meaning more space for gardening, hobbies, kids, etc. You get to have neighbors without literally living on top of eachother. Usually more quiet then urban settings,etc.
Living within 30 minutes of my job in the city costs $3,000/month in rent for a 800sf apartment. Living within walking distance would cost $4,000 if I could even find anything to rent.
Living an hour away costs $750/month in rent for a 1200sf trailer. My car note is $450/month and I spend about $300/month on gasoline on average. All in my rent, vehicle, and gas is half the cost of just the rent in the city.
Yeah - there's an extra hour lost every day to the drive, but the savings comes out to around $75/hr for that commute. And I have the freedom to travel anywhere I want with my vehicle on top of that.
So yeah, I live suburban and fuck anyone who criticizes me for making that sensible economic decision.
Nobody's saying 'fuck you' for being forced into suburbs. Were saying 'fuck you' to the people who built suburbs instead of high density housing and made housing near your job unaffordable.
And the people who genuinely had the choice (I might argue you didn't) and chose to pay extra for suburb.
I mean to be fair people might be more open to it if high density housing didn't suck ass. The exact same shitty template copy pasted a thousand times. It's honestly not even that it's the same that's the problem it's that the template sucks ass.
There is a middle ground between high-density housing and showing you into a tiny poorly put together space but nobody seems willing to build that. Give me a suburb house, a full two floors, with a standard layout. And turn that into high density housing and I'm willing to bet a lot more people would be fine with it.
It's not like that's even all that difficult to imagine, we build fucking skyscrapers 100 plus stories tall there's zero reason we couldn't just take a two-story suburb townhome and just stack 50 of them on top of each other. Then the only thing lost is a dedicated garage and your own private backyard which some people will still heavily want but it's a much easier pill to swallow versus the "shitty cramped poorly designed apartment layout"
Also it should be mandatory that high density housing has a minimum of one dedicated parking spot per unit, the first two floors of any high-density buildings should be dedicated to a parking garage. That is the other thing that makes people say fuck you to high density housing is it's always a shit ton of units crammed into not enough parking and it's a huge pita to deal with. Do we need better design the cities that are less reliant on cars for transport? Yes, but you should still expect at least one car per unit regardless it's just the reality of America
I agree we do dog shit architecture, especially residential.
We do not need more parking spaces though. We need trains. I'm sorry, but its too late to be putting more fucking cars on the road; even 'clean' electric ones.
Even if you got rid of all the bureaucracy bullshit and started building trains everywhere tomorrow that would not remove the need for people to have cars. And the idea that you should be able to build a building that does not have enough spaces for everyone that lives there to have one is unreasonable.
Even if I could literally walk outside and immediately outside of my door get onto a train there are still going to be times I would need a vehicle. Even if I only use it once a year I would still like to be able to own my own. I would like to live somewhere that I only need to use my vehicle a couple times a year but I still need to have somewhere to put it
You really don't ever need a car, with good public transit. You can use the delivery van or rent something twice a year, I'm sure.
Depending on geography, even delivery vans may be unnecessary; cargo bikes work pretty well on flat terrain.
I haven't ever had a car. Not in a hypothetical world where we built public transit, but here, in the present/past real world. Most of the times this has been a problem were caused by other people using cars, and I don't consider becoming part of the problem to be a solution there. It can be done.
I would be really annoyed having to rent something every time I wanted a new bed, tv, dresser, that sort of thing. It's nice having my own vehicle that can do it.
Like I said we should absolutely have good robust public transportation everywhere so that I only need to use it on those very specific occasions which will drastically cut down on the problems with so many cars but I should still be able to have one. Trying to outright remove cars from people will never lead to anything useful because they will fight you tooth and nail.
Make it so that I don't need it but can still have it if I want it and suddenly they will be on the road significantly less often, I'm glad that you have been able to get by without one and are happy but not everyone is going to be the same. I mean hell I regularly make trips between the states almost every other week for seeing friends and I would really hate to do that on public transportation because it would take what's already a 6-hour round trip and probably turn it into a 10 hour round trip.
Dude its not worth the space (and maintenance, insurance, etc) of an entire car for two deliveries a year, thats fuvking insane, get over yourself. And people can include rental/delivery in cost of the item or wherever. Or we can gave full communism and they just do it.
Plus, and I say this living in California; cargo bikes really do work fine most places. Even here (not all, but most) youre just being afraid of change, And it's cringe.
I'm sorry, but the earths carrying capacity does not have room for your pathological american bullshit.
And what if it's pouring down rain? Or snowing? And I just don't feel like becoming completely soaked just to go to the grocery store. There are lots of reasons someone might want a car over a bike. I actually have a bike and I do use it, fun fact I'm also a bus driver so I'm pretty fond of public transportation because it directly feeds my livelihood. However I have this neat little thing where I don't really sweat much even if I'm basically on the verge of heat stroke. So if it's anything more than like 60° F outside and sunny and I'm doing some type of cardio such as biking i will start to overheat.
So the majority of my bike riding is in the fall and winter months, but I do very much enjoy during those months when I can take the bike to work thankfully I don't have to go very far and I get to ride the local transit for free as a bus driver.
The carrying capacity of Earth is already handling the majority of Americans owning multiple cars, I'm literally only asking for enough parking for one car for each individual in the design of a building. Which is literally just a couple floors of a parking garage and you're over here asking like I want the end of the world. If you ever want to see Improvement in public transportation you need to stop being so extremist because it pushes people away from the idea entirely
Dude, youve never seen a good transit system have you? You shouldn't be walking more than a couple blocks
Or get shit delivered
Or, hey, what if we stop driving cars so we can stop global warming getting worse? And more people don't have this fucking problem?
the carrying capacity of earth is already handling
No its fucking not and if we keep going like this literally everyone dies. I dunno about you, but I can think of much more pleasant ways to go out than climate apocalypse.
you'll never get better transit if you jeep being so radical
What I'm hearing here is "I fucking hate public transit and enjoy fucking my car! witness me!
Have you ever taken a train? Amtrak is a fucking joy.
Like genuinely a pleasant experience, and I don't just mean the joy of not getting dry fucked by sandpaper and barbed wire. Its really comfy, the scenery is often quite nice, there's decent WiFi and a bar, you can wander the train and fuck off to the bar if you get bored reading or whatever-not a great bar; beer and wine only no coctails, but we could fix that too.
And if we actually cared about rail, especially passenger rail, the speed caps on that are so much fucking higher than you could possibly get with individual cars. Trips would be more frequent, too.
Yes I'm familiar with riding trains, both in and out of the us. It is enjoyable but it is much slower than just hopping in my car and going straight to where I'm going. For the sake of those trips where I'm hopping around between states and coming back in a single day I would not want to have to do it by train. When I'm going out of state and staying out of state for a couple days train is perfectly fine and as long as the Amtrak lines up with my schedule I generally will
Do you want those states to have living things in them in fifty years? Do you want exterior temperatures under 105f/40c most days?
Because you can't have both that and cars. This isnt me being your mom, this is me telling you youre the reason I don't bother with savings, because I have an inkling what the world is gonna be in twenty years if we don't fix shit now, and I'm not eager to see that shit.
Have you actually looked at any of the studies the majority of our greenhouse gases are coming from? Transportation is only a small piece of it. If your goal is to stop climate change then there are significantly more important things you could be targeting. Fuels used for generating electricity, as byproducts in the manufacturing of goods, and the clear cutting of forests all contribute significantly more to Greenhouse production than Transportation does.
That's not to say we shouldn't reduce Transportation emissions still, which you seem to think I'm not advocating for but I clearly am because I am saying I want better public transportation and I want to be able to use my car less often I just don't want it taken away from me entirely. But using it as an argument for the removal of cars is weak because it's not even one of the largest contributors
Like I'm for reducing agriculture emissions(going vegan), I'm for increasing rail to the point flying feels absurd (and getting rid of it, mostly), and I'm for not burning fossil fuels for any reason. But the future where we just switched to electric cars abd everything else is the same? We (or our grandparents) walked past that door, carter admin or Chevy volt at the latest. Its underwater now.
The ecological cost of cars (break and tire dust in our lungs and water-thats where most of your microplastics come from) producing and moving tons of material for every 1-5 hundred pound human, black pavement that won't let water through, and just the sheer wasted space, we can't afford it anymore. Its not worth it.
But its not all bad! Trains are cool as fuck, and crazy efficient per joule-a filthy diesel train belching clouds of smoke is cleaner and greener than an electric car running on clean nuclear/wind power, so imagine what we could do with overhead wire/third rail?
And yeah you might have to walk a block or two to the train station, once robust transit gets put in, but you'd get your steps in, and honestly in Los Angeles most people walk at least that far to their cars anyway.
Because they're subsidized to Fuck and city costs are inflated. Suburbs are ecological nightmares, and cannot continue to exist if you want a green earth in 80 years.
City costs are inflated by exploitative landlords.
Suburb costs are subsidized by basically all the infrastructure for them; none of it pays for itself. Not the roads not the wiring not the water and sewer. Yes I know everywhere has roads, but suburbs demand a high standard of them and don't produce anything with them.
Youre not being space efficient like a city, or (whatever degree of) self sufficient like the country, so everything is just car trips, any time you leave the house. Like in OP.
I did the same math and my results came out the opposite way - in a much cheaper country however. I had a rent free situation over an hour away, but ended up renting an apartment near work. My time alone was worth it, being able to pay the month's rent using one week's commute time for freelancing after work. And the monthly fuel cost itself would've been 2/3 of my month's rent.
Everyone's circumstances are different. I made what I believe was the most sensible economic decision - paying to get out of commuting. For you, the opposite was sensible, commuting to reduce rent. Can't really judge you for doing what's best for your wallet in these tough times we're living.
I mean if you get urban and rural, what's there not to get about the suburbs? It's the best and worst of both. More open lands and less congestion but also rush hour sucks and people suck at driving. It's far to go get something, but car rides with buddies is its own fun.
It's not the best of both though, it just the worst of both.
The best of both are small towns along railways, with a dense core with some amenities surrounded by decreasing density until it quickly becomes pure countryside, and thanks to the station it's easy to get to and from the big city.
And if you only want rural surroundings you can have train halts basically in the middle of nowhere, there's a couple like that in my region and it's absolutely delightful.
So do you put a population limit on small towns? How do you think major Metropolitan areas got started? They didn't just appear one day, they grew over time from small port and station towns...
huh? why would suburbs magically be exempt from that idea?
Yes, places grow, this is why it's important to apply good urban planning and use as much high density housing as possible, otherwise you get the miserable car-dependent sprawl we see in america and much of the rest of the world.
By centering around transit stops you get rid of the need for all the parking and roads that takes a ton of space (which lets urban areas be smaller while containing the same amount of living space), and by having many small towns with high density centers spread out like this you maximize how many people can live close to the countryside.
My point is that what you described is basically a city with suburbs on a reduced scale. If a town is nice and successful, you're gonna have people that want to move there, so your options are to build outward, upward, or not at all. It sounds like you'd prefer towns build upward rather than outward, which is obviously valid, but it's a matter of preference. People who don't mind living in an apartment will move into the city center, people who value space over commute will move to the suburbs.
Where I think things get turned around (in the states anyway), is the lack of community-run programs and local business owners. Community gardens, neighborhood solar cells, locally owned farms, grocers, and corner stores are all things I'd like to see way more of in suburban areas.
Not the best. The best of rural is nature wildness and independence. The ability to wander off into your backyard and shoot something and not get an eyebrow raised. The ability to pick a direction, and start walking, and not turn around until your water gets low, then go home, and not meet another person unless you choose to. The option to just dig a big ass hole or marvel at the intricacy of the ecology. Maybe have a few dozen semi feral cats, so nobody xan quite say you are ir arent the creepy cat lady. The best of rural is room to experiment and play, to be entirely food independent, etc. And oh my god it can get so quiet! Its nice. Peaceful, if a little rough. And if something goes horribly globally wrong? Might not even be your problem.
Suburbs have... A little privacy indoors, I guess? Room for a small garden, if your house is old, maybe some fruit trees? A garage to play with if you don't drive, which is a major sacrifice?
The best of urban us art culture and people at your fingertips, connectedness and depth. Walking two blocks into an entirely different world, hopping on the train/bus to a dozen art museums and twice as many different cuisines and so many options. Knowing that there are friends for you nearby, if you just find them. Enemies too, probably. Its collaboration and history and the intense humanness of the designed world around you, and oh my god the architecture. At its best, which I admit is rare, its the very very almost imperceptibly low grade version of the thrill of collaboration all the time. And if something goes horribly globally wrong, at least you know youre not alone. Its pretty cool. I'm a fan.
Suburbs have none of this. They pretend at the restaurants, but they're all chain shit, homogenized to pointlessness.
Suburbs are garbage. Youre as dependent on long ass supply chains as an urban core, but you're all tiny little ratter dogs pretending to be wolves on the tundra, so you don't acknowledge or embrace it. You get all the isolation with none of the solitude. It takes almost as long to get anywhere, but you can't just chill on your farm or go forage in the woods, so you need to go.
Suburbs ate garbage poison and ecologically unsustainable. One can argue modern cities are unsustainable too, but there's room for doubt on that one; there are economies of scale to take advantage of.
I like suburbs because it's relatively calm, I can build a workshop in my garage, and there's still pretty good amenities. And it's significantly cheaper than the city.
I've been an urban pedestrian/cyclist all my life. Unfortunately I chose a career path that means I now have to work far from a city. I just failed my driving test. I don't even want to drive. I fucking hate this so much.
for baking, I mix 1 tsp psyllium with 3 Tbsp room temperature water and let it sit for about 5 minutes (or until an egg-like viscosity)
psylli-egg has a more neutral texture and flavor than a flax or chia egg. unlike flax it won't go rancid (I'm still using a large bucket of it that's years old and hasn't changed flavor or effectiveness). its only real downside is it takes slightly longer to hydrate
I personally wouldn't try to replicate a shakshuka or anything with it but if you try let me know how it goes haha
My wife is vegan so we do a lot of vegan baking, especially around the holidays, but we also don't stock eggs or dairy in the house anyway.
So usually we are using applesauce as an egg supplement. I never liked flax in general, but I do keep chia and fiber supplements around (especially since starting Adderall), so that's good to know.
for the chia, worth tossing them in a coffee/spice grinder if you don't want whole chia seed texture in the baked good (though they're a decent poppyseed substitute imho)
works wonders for flax as well, but yeah flax is really the C tier of egg replacers lol
i also just had the thought that basil seeds might work similarly to chia seeds. they also gel
Heh, that is the combo I mix into my oatmeal cake, it's oats, psyllium, flax, chia, some protein powder, lots of berries, old bananas, comes out really good.
I mean, if you have psyllium at home vs you have to drive x miles for the eggs then psyllium will be cheaper for that one thing, probably, also depends how much you value your time, which I value highly
Aquafaba. Can be bought readymade but is also a by-product of cooking dried chickpeas. After soaking chickpeas in water for a night discard the soaking water. Bring fresh water to boil and cook the chickpeas for 1/2 an hour or so. Collect the cooking water. You can even also freeze it for later use. It's important to bring it to room temperature before using it in baking. Can bring a good amount of fluffyness to your doughs.
No clue why you got downvoted, bean water is kind of just the best egg substitute, if the leftover water from soaking dried beans works as an egg subsitute why on god's green earth would people use anything else? (yes obviously they should use something else if they can't eat beans, i should not have to say that)
Shops closing on Sundays in Germany is no workers rights issue. No one is asking workers to work 7 days a week.
Germany as plenty of students, for example, who'd love to have a job on the weekend because they have the freedom to choose a bit better when they work and when not.
The reason Sunday to this day is still a day when almost all shops have to close is mostly religious. There are restaurants and some other shops that are allowed to stay open and most of them choose either a different rest day or make sure that they have someone on any of those days. One workday on a Sunday is plenty to fill out a typical untaxed low payment job that are very useful to students and others looking to just get a bit of an income.
Actual workers rights aren't telling people that they can never work on Sundays, they're guaranteeing people that they will never need to work too much.
Why? Cause shops are open on sunday? Having no workers rights makes that a lot easier
Yes. Shops being closed on Sundays is a major PITA. I have 2 days off a week. So I have to buy groceries in overcrowded shops in the evening or in overcrowded shops on Saturdays. Or I drive across the border and buy in Luxemburg, on Sundays. So the VAT I am creating stays in another country. Which is just plain stupid.
Also: workers' rights and shops being open on Sundays aren't mutually exclusive.
The churches don't have enough political influence to keep Sunday a rest day. That we still have a mostly closed down Sunday (minus vital and emergency services and recreation) is union influence. IG Metall and Ver.di would skin the SPD alive if they were to propose abolishing it.
Consider the alternative: All your friends have different days off, so organising a grill party becomes a once in a summer opportunity when all your days off happen to align.
On the contrary there's a lot of shift work in industry, especially IG Metall's "core" clientele, metalworkers. A blast furnace don't care whether it's Sunday you need workers to work it, 24/7 -- with extra extra pay for night shifts and Sundays. But IG Metall also covers the engineering side and with that IT workers, plenty of white-collar jobs included it's a really big tent.
I live in suburbia in the US and I can walk to 3 different grocery stores from my house. If I go to the warehouse store, I will drive. Between telework, walking, and avoiding unnecessary trips to various places, I try to drive less than 1 mile per day.
Density kinda sucks to live in, but we can all make more effort to waste less energy.
If you drive less than 1 mile per day it sounds like you shouldn't have to drive at all. It's walking distance - is your destination not reachable on foot?
Its an average. Some days I don't drive at all. Some days I have to bring a family member several miles to an appointment, or get something bulky from a store that I can't feasibly move without a vehicle.
I'm in the same boat, I have two grocery stores, three gas stations, a bank, several fast food/take out restaurants, a Home Depot, a pharmacy, and several walking trails, all within about a 10-15 minute walk from my house. Also live in suburbia, and would like to get a bike this summer to start cutting out driving.
Can't eliminate most of my driving though, I work about 30 minutes from home for a general contractor, and public transport would require me to leave my dog alone for over 12 hours a day, which just isn't an option.
There's a simple solution. If the recipe calls for n eggs and you're replacing each egg with 60mL of blood but instead have M mL of blood, make M/(60*N) recipes.
Eg, recipe calls for 2 eggs and you've bled 1.5 L of blood, first do the difficult conversion from L to mL (my witch doctor tells me it's 1500 mL). Now, use the formula: 1500 / (60*2), which simplifies to 25 / 2 or 12.5.
You just need to make 12.5 of your recipe. Just multiply each of the ingredients by 12.5 and you'll be good. Oh and you'll need to adjust cooking time, too, though maybe keep a fire extinguisher handy.
I still rent, unfortunately, (southern California) but at least my neighborhood doesn’t have an HOA. Those suburban sprawl super sterile neighborhoods like I grew up in in another state are just not at all attractive to live in.
I have a pretty large garden and sometime this year will have a chicken coop, as it’s allowed here as long as no roosters. Also just bought a greenhouse kit. Eating your own food is incredible.
I think I only ever lived in the real "center" of a city once when I was crashing at a friends place while looking for an apartment.
All of my other places have been further out in neighborhoods outside of the center but there were still shops everywhere. Single use zoning and the tendency to obsess over shitty copypaste single family homes is the real culprit in the US.
Europe's city centers are friggin expensive, if you know what I'm talking about you know. The suburbs are usually fine, also some of the best paces ever are between the suburbs and the center. Locals in the old town will make you pay for the oxygen they have in
In China it’s easy to afford rent in most of the cities on a full time minimum wage job, and the cities are extremely walkable. My wife lives in a 18 story building, and immediately outside of her development are at least 6 supermarkets, 20 restaurants and countless bus stations and subway stations. Sounds like it’s more of a problem with the economic system than the city itself.
It is the single greatest place I have ever been in my life. The air pollution in the cities I went to, which included Beijing, was no worse than it is in my Colorado city. They’ve done a lot to combat it, and though there’s still bad days, we also have bad days. Hell, we were known for the “brown cloud” for decades, and still regularly have inversions that cause the cloud these days, thankfully much less often though. There’s also a lot more electric vehicles there than there are here, so less ground level pollution from exhaust. I felt so sick my first couple days back in the states and everything smelled so bad. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until my nose wasn’t accustomed to it anymore.
What boggles my mind here, in my province, is that a lot of new dense condos/apartments are built without any walkable services. It is mind boggling that it still happens.
Nothing worse than having to take your car to do small errands.
We have to fight the armies of NIMBYs and developers to even get a suite of overpriced luxury condos or apartments built, and we’re still building gigantic McMansion suburbs like they’re going out of style, so I feel that in my bones. My nearest grocery store is more than 2 miles away, and there’s no way to get there without having to go down a 45mph road with no sidewalks. But we have pretty monoculture lawns! -_- thank god my family is willing to turn most of our lawn into pollinator gardens and food gardens… now if only we could convince our neighbors to do the same.
