(Besides NYC) what walkable cities?
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Chicago and Philly are dramatically cheaper and plenty walkable
Chicago kinda, Philly barely
depends on where you are in philly, but it's significantly better than stroads on stroads for ever and no sidewalks lol
parts of philly are very walkable though, like all of south
Boston is extremely walkable, it's a relatively small big city and most of it was built before cars. I've got a picture of my old apartment building with dirt streets and a horse carriage out front. I used to regularly walk from one end of the city to the other for leisure. The T is surprisingly good public transit for america too. They've even been doing free fares on some of the bus routes for the last few years, and just extended that experiment because it was pretty successful.
People drag it for not being a grid sometimes (the "paved-over cowpaths" myth) but that's because the streets go around hills since they needed to be traversed by people and horses.
In terms of affordability Boston is worse than NYC
Oh my God my partner and I recently looked at a bunch of cities to decide where to apply for jobs, and we were fucking floored when we saw how expensive Boston was.
Why the fuck is rent more than NYC and SF??? It was literally over $1000 more per month than the other cities on our list including DC, Seattle, and Chicago.
So the thing with the Boston rental market is it depends on what time of year you're looking. Like 75% of Boston leases open on Sept. 1 and end on August 31. Most apartments come on the market for the current year in the first 3 months of the year (Jan/Feb/March) so if you're looking outside of that time window there's much less available and the prices are higher.
Edit: There's also no rent control which helps nothing
Why the fuck does the Boston rental market work the same way as my shitty little college town
Because Boston is the biggest, shittiest, college town in the country.
Because Boston is actually like 20 colleges in a trench coat
On the plus side, Allston Christmas rules
You literally cannot even get through traffic hardly around the week that college students are moving in in Boston
Boston is so expensive
DC is very walkable. The metro is slightly less extensive than NYC but is way more reliable imo and also not nasty.
But the NYC subway is free 
Seattle's downtown, Fremont, and Ballard neighborhoods. But be careful because each of those extend past the walkable area (like Fremont and Ballard extend past their walkable area and include straight up suburbs).
the only part of the US that is walkable is the part built before cars, so mostly just the northeast, like NYC and north. any other cities suck for walking compared to anywhere else on earth.
the west coast is the most inhuman landscape ever created on planet earth. its is so ugly and awful.
Portland and Seattle are lovely and have many walkable neighborhoods. SF is expensive, and so is the entire bay really, but Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville are very walkable and ever so slightly more affordable compared to being on the Peninsula itself. Many of the Central Valley cities are unwalkable car based hell holes, and so is much of SoCal for that matter, but I have friends who live in Sacramento and they won't shut up about how happy they are to go car free and how the city is dramatically expanding bike infrastructure. It's very neighborhood dependent still, but I don't see why they'd be lying to me about it and they did indeed sell their cars in favor of ebikes, so the proof is in the pudding there.
Davis, and the areas near it, is famously bike friendly. There are bike lanes pretty much everywhere, and the car drivers are acclimated to bike transit enough that they aren’t crazy dangerous.
Sacramento is a bigger city, so it’s probably a bit harder to really bike transform it fully, but hopefully the process continues.
Parts of the midwest are old enough as well. There's lanes where it was clearly designed before cars were everywhere.
There are also pockets of most major cities that are walkable. Unfortunately it isn't easy to know where they are unless you live there. The only clue is to look at places that are within 1 block of grocery stores, which is probably the top constraint.
There's https://www.walkscore.com/ but it can be both too critical and too lax when rating some places.
Developers have been using walkscore as a marketing tool for years. The correlation between the score and places that have gentrified or are gentrifying is pretty significant.
I am not surprised. 
That's also the nature of urban development in the United States. Highly walkable areas are gonna correlate with those that are getting all the "revitalization funds" that build new infrastructure. We already know that American cities don't want to invest in the areara as they exist.
Tbf the correlation between places that are walkable and places that have gentrified is pretty significant
If I had to be stuck in the great satan forever, I would bust a fat nut if I could live in San Francisco or Honolulu.
how do i acclimate to yurt culture instead
I'm hurtin for a yurtin
I've been trying for over a year now but getting a job anywhere but here seems impossible. I've been trying to save up some cash as a buffer, but I have an ok job already where I am. I'd want to move to Philly, but have no friends or contacts there at all. No clue what the job market is like either since I can't get any responses to my applications.
Maybe someday I'll make it work, but it's a struggle right now.
I'm genuinely a much happier, healthier, and overall more satisfied person now that I live in a walkable city and can bike as both a hobby and a mode of transport. I wish more cities in the US were this dense. I wish this was more accessible to people.
Maybe someday. Things seem to be moving in a generally positive direction, even if slowly. I've recently realized just how effective local activism and showing up to community meetings is (spoiler: VERY.)
Same that's why I'm posting about it. Without even meaning to im walking like 4 miles a day and I feel great.
Lived in shitty small towns in the south my whole life, just incomparable
I had to go to the exurbs recently for something and Jesus Christ, I can't believe people willingly subject themselves to that shit just so they can have a big house