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In Europe at least it is super hard to afford rent inside the centre of a big city. But yeah being a “walking pedestrian” is soooo cool.
And you can actually do it in the urban suburbs :) but in Paris for example, the cost of living is so high in the suburbs and the center.
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.
If it weren’t for authoritarianism, pollutions and terrible cyberpunk stuff + human's right violation I think I’d love to live in China lol
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.
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
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.