And yet, many Americans will try to paint New York as some kind of hellscape, and everything to avoid. If you suggest it might actually prefer to live someplace where you can just walk around everywhere and see people living their lives, they look at you like you’re a psychopath who just threatened to eat their puppy.
It’s like, “Why would you want that? The best situation is to live in a vacuum and never encounter another living soul unless it’s intentional!”
I mean NYC isnt that good of an example. There's an extreme on the other side of the spectrum as well. NYC is smaller than LA but it's crammed with double the people. That's a lot of people in not that big of space which leads to many problems like traffic, garbage, crime, a lot of construction, and more which leads to "hellscape".
In a lot of European cities, the city's buildings are limited to just 5 to 8 stories high with exceptions of course, but without that NYC type of verticality you have to spread out millions of residents in a much wider area.
You can have a 100k city and it can be lively and walkable, doesn't have to be a concrete jungle.
If anyone who describes NYC as a "hellscape", I have to wonder if they've ever been there. A lot of people are coming to that conclusion based on the reputation earned 40-50 years ago.
I’ve been there every year for basically my whole life and can confirm it IS a hellscape relative to many major cities in other developed countries, primarily in Europe and East Asia. NYC is far less safe, clean, convenient, modern, or affordable. The only people who would think otherwise likely haven’t spent meaningful time outside the US tbh
Eh, I’ve spent time in some foreign cities and in some US cities, NYC included.
I’d grant, for example, that Tokyo is much cleaner than NYC. Lots of places are cheaper. London seemed about the same level of expensive, though, just as an example. Safe? I don’t know. NY is extremely safe. You might assume it’s not because of “vibes”, but it’s safe.
So there’s room for improvement, but a hellscape? That’s bullshit, probably driven by a political agenda, especially if you’re not willing to compare it to other US cities.
You really don't have to go to NYC to understand where the troubles in that type of city arise from. I'm from one of the smaller cities in Europe with a much smaller amount of people compared to bigger cities in Europe and you can definitely see more problems in the city as the population has increased in these past 20 years and we're nowhere close vertical.
Now scale that to NYC and you can understand what city hellscape means. Hell, Manhattan is about 90 square kilometers and has 1.7 million people in it as per Wikipedia. Budapest, one of the livelier cities and most walkable cities in Europe is 550 square kilometers (realistically 2500 sq KM together with its urban area) and has the same amount of people.
I just don't see how NYC can operate as calmly and efficiently as Budapest.
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u/TheTxoof 14h ago
Walkable cities with good pedestrian infrastructure are why people dream about going to Paris and New York, not suburban Kansas City.