Comments by "Nunya Bidness" (@nunyabidness3075) on "Can we fix the suburbs?" video.

Since the roads are generally laid out by the developers, they reflect what the developers thought would sell best. Don’t go blaming capitalism though because it was statism. The federal housing programs ensured the whole scheme would follow their wishes by taking over the mortgage market in the name of affordable housing. The public was then primed to think that new safe neighborhoods had a certain look and feel.
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Where do you live that you cannot find anything like that in your town? I live in Houston, TX. We are the poster child for suburb hate vids and the arch nemesis of the city planning industry. I can walk to most everything and easily bike downtown or to the museum area or the medical center mostly on dedicated trails. I’m in a 3 story town home. We have an electric bike for our second “car”. Bus stop is two blocks away which gets us to rail as well. If as many people chose walkable neighborhoods as gripe about suburbs, there would be no need to gripe about suburbs.
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@mardiffv.8775 There’s lots of variety in Houston because there is no traditional zoning. The neighborhood I’m in now was cheap twenty years ago. It’s very mixed now. If you can buy, picking an area on the way up is a useful skill.
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@angelsy1975 I’m not saying that isn’t a thing, but it’s not the thing here. This was pure statism. The schools have done an amazing job teaching half truth in this country. Price setting was very common until the mid 70’s. Wilson jumped the shark on statism, and it wasn’t until Reagan that much of it went away (most people have no idea how much still remains in reality. People cry about him in ignorance. Most everything related to material wealth improved greatly during the eighties and nineties FOR EVERYONE because a lot of the interference went away. It started creeping back in as soon as he got close to the end of his presidency. It’s back to ridiculous now, only less obviously.
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@rexx9496 They are expensive or they are cheap and undesirable. That’s the reality. The fact that many are expensive is actually good. The amount of midrises opened in the last five years in my area is amazing. Yes, they want high rents, but there are low cost options blocks away. Most are 50 or 60 year old buildings. New is always expensive. If new is inexpensive someone is going broke, and building stops, and rents correct.
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@laurie7689 I wouldn’t recommend changing the road network in your neighborhood, but the limited ins and outs have mostly been proven to be of little usefulness in many of Houston’s suburbs. When an area fails, the crime goes up anyways. The damage to the system also has unintended consequences. While it means less traffic in front of some houses, it means more in front of some others. The kids now don’t play in most streets anyways, and they are mostly driven to schools as well. Traffic then is funneled into the “major streets” which become nightmares during peak times. I lived in an old section of Denver on a grid and they had cleverly made most residential lots on roads perpendicular to the traffic heading in and out of downtown. It was truly better.
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@laurie7689 Yes, I pointed out a lot of people do want to live in suburbs, and you should not be denied it by fiat. I’ve found that there are lots of aspects of modern suburbs I’m not a fan of anymore, and given a choice, I prefer the much older suburbs which people don’t think were ever suburbs, but were. If I can afford it and find it, I prefer small lot single family (with small multi family and garage apartments included) in a walkable neighborhood with garages on an alleyway. 10 to 20 foot setbacks are good with mature trees. Since Covid, the world is a mess, and you take what you can get (which is hard on the young folk, but at least they will likely live to see it get better).
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@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 Yes, working for the other choices is great so long as it’s about creation. Way too much urbanism is about destruction.
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@barryrobbins7694 I was attempting to cut off the inevitable snipe.
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@rcfanatic2000 No, it’s statism. Go read what I said again. You don’t have to go full Soviet to be statism. The only way most families were buying was with a government back mortgage, and the mortgage game was fixed to easily approve developments that met certain “standards” and hard to get for other types of properties. It literally was a rigged system.
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@barryrobbins7694 The whole Strong Towns thing is very suspect. I think he makes a lot of good points, but the suburbs subsidizing the dense inner city is based on a flawed methodology. If you look at the actual budgets, instead of cherry picking certain costs, density costs MORE per capita. The reality is that Strong Towns mostly just confirms why central planning fails - accounting for everything is just too complex to do.
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@SomeGuyWhoPlaysGames333 How about you make an actual point so this can become constructive? Why is capitalism so bad in your opinion? Perhaps you can name what industries or parts of the economy you find it ruins?
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@barryrobbins7694 NJB’s references ST as his source. The problem is not better explanation being necessary. The problem is that reality does not conform to the ST theories. There should be municipal bankruptcies all over. Many municipalities virtually ran out of space to keep up the supposed ponzi scheme decades ago, but have not failed. It seems to me you are now simply flailing for a way out. You now want to assume suburbs are getting more federal aid than large cities while trying to downplay the costs and rely on climate change and other theories to explain the evils of suburbs. Why? What’s so important about the ST movement? I don’t need it to know I prefer walkable neighborhoods with mixed uses based more on what the residents and owners decide than what people in city hall or some other government office even more detached think should be done.
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@barryrobbins7694 There’s no such thing as scientific consensus. Science is always changing. If your concern is climate change then let’s get serious. Raise energy and pollution taxes, enact school choice, and start putting violent criminals back in the prisons again. The big draws of the suburbs are better schools and less crime and lower cost. All fixed.
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Amazing how little anyone wants to talk about block busting schemes which necessitated government aid to be successful even when they show the results to throw shade on suburbs. Now, the big money and the government types are at it all over again with abusive ADU rules. Why YouTuber urbanists don’t see it is a bit of a mystery to me.
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@barryrobbins7694 Live and let live. Lots of people (aka voters) want to live in suburbs. You don’t change their minds by force. That will only make things worse. That’s how it started and we are still dealing with it. Social engineering is ineffective.
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@Luredreier You might want to be specific as to what and whether it was actually his doing. Otherwise, you are just a said victim of revisionists and statist flunkies who misuse statistics and “studies” of which most were dubious to start with.
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@laurie7689 I think playing in the street has become pretty rare, even in cul de sacs. Good your kids are outside. In many older designed neighborhoods, most kids can walk to school because the only time they will hit a busy street is usually where the crossing guard is for the school. The post war exclusion designs mostly prevents that until you get to some of the master planned communities that planned the school locations to have trail access or back roads into the mazes. Kids play in the street occasionally here without a cult de sac. It’s just not like when I was a kid, where if you went a couple blocks you saw a second bunch of kids out.
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@barryrobbins7694 This has little or nothing to do with physics, and I have no idea why any municipalities should pay for other municipalities. Also, it seems you might live in an area where the cities do not have suburbs within their own borders, but that’s not at all universal. You are losing me. How about a real world example. Finally, I explained that dense cities like Boston or Chicago have higher spending per capita than less dense cities like Houston or KC. Density costs more in reality. Strong towns looks at cherry picked infrastructure costs and excludes everything else. It’s like saying BMW’s are cheaper than Chevy’s because some list of parts are less expensive when compared. Doesn’t matter. Americans who buy comparable cars from both companies pay more for the German cars.
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@EsotericCat Define “they” for both systems. Who decides is what it’s all about.
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@career5690 More accurately I’m for free markets.
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@mohammedsarker5756 Walkable is now more desirable. It wasn’t 50 years ago. Housing markets respond slowly, and over regulated markets respond slowly or incorrectly. Put the two together and you get this. Texas isn’t immune. The fight between rural and urban rules is starting to cause big problems. New York has tons of potential upstate, but keeps making big government, urban activist laws that suppress upstate main streets and other employers. The gray market in employment is huge upstate, and everyone wants cash. It’s a sure sign of too much government and taxes.
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@vergildisparda Yes. I don’t know why you think it’s funny. Could also be describing most of Houston’s neighborhoods near downtown. Navigation, Heights, Wash Ave, Memorial park, Montrose, Museum District, Med Center, Herman Park, Hyde Park, etc.
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@vergildisparda Not really that expensive, but what do you expect? People don’t build nice new mid rises in bad neighborhoods where the sales or rents won’t cover the costs. Really funny fact: They don’t make new old neighborhoods. I bought into Montrose after it was on the way up, but long before it got expensive. Looking at a neighborhood and house that’s cheap today, but will not be tomorrow is a skill. Learn it if you can, and it will save you money.
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@angelsy1975 I’ve never seen anyone talk about the lobbyists from the “developers” being behind the mortgage regulations. It was a populist plan afaik. All with good intentions for middle class Americans and more government power and a free lunch. I don’t think your half truth thing is all that clever, btw. You can always say anything was created that way, but even if it’s 99% there’s still the one percent. There’s really no use for thinking everything is the result of corruption. It doesn’t move the ball unless you have specifics.
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@laurie7689 Great solution. I was thinking your kids were still small, lol.
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@barryrobbins7694 An expectation of payment without any way to force it is worthless. Now, what exactly are these people doing you want them to be forced to pay?
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@barryrobbins7694 What about all the other ones? Especially the ones that haven’t been able to grow their boundaries? Ponzi schemes don’t usually last for half a century or more. Are you going to try everything you can think of while ignoring everything I say? How about you get serious about it or give it up?
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