Some thoughts on suburbia and its merits or lack thereof

 Matt Yglesias had an interesting bit in his newsletter this morning:

"If it were allowed, this same logic would carry over to houses built for middle class people. All else being equal, a $400,000 detached house should have fewer square feet of house than a $400,000 townhouse which in turn has fewer than a $400,000 unit in a small condo. So you ought to see the urban/suburban calculus driven by preference for outdoor vs indoor space rather by preference for space per se. You could have a big house in a missing middle neighborhood and need to go to the neighborhood park, or you could have a yard and need to deal with a smaller house."

2020 has been an interesting test of this theory, or at least revealed some implications of it, because our family did decide to trade off traditional suburban home amenities for a neighborhood with a number of trails and a dedicated playground (and pool), most of which have been unavailable or severely constricted for the vast majority of the year. From our perspective, that tradeoff is looking like a bad one, though that view may be revised should 2020 ever end.

Along the same lines, we ran an unintended natural experiment earlier this year. One of the things that made my own childhood possible was the knowledge that there were neighbors, parents, and other kids out and about pretty much all the time, which ensured that if you just sent your kids out the door, you could loosely attempt to keep an eye on them and they'd be fine. Well, once quarantine hit, we recreated those eyes-in-the-neighborhood conditions, and no one sent their kids out at all. That shift seems to be final and definitive.