Suburbs feel empty because you have to drive everywhere, and there are few if any third spaces you can go to where there is no expectation to spend money.
The AI image is supposed to be depicting kids/families going door to door in their neighborhood trick-or-treating on Halloween. The reason this is less common today is because of the phenomenon of "trunk-or-treating" where families will form a group and schedule to go to a parking lot and offer candy from their cars for kids to go from car to car. One reason they cite for doing this is because walking around in suburbia is dangerous due to all the cars.
the bigger reason is parenting has just become intolerable, they don't even let kids walk home from the bus stop where i live anymore, whats even the point of the bus
"kids don't go anywhere anymore" yeah because for the first 16 years of their life they somehow aren't allowed to go around unattended. the only ones that do are the ones that shouldn't be roaming around by themselves. which reinforces the broken mentality
but once they turn 16 by any means let them drive a 3 ton vehicle, even though their odds of death are orders of magnitude higher than anything that would happen walking around with any level of traffic smarts (but again, they don't have traffic smarts, since they're not allowed to go outside alone when young)
On Halloween night, our neighborhood looks exactly like the one in the image (minus the cars parked in the street). It's a parade of kids, their parents, and their dogs from dinner time to midnight. Like, hundreds of trick-or-treaters come to our door.
On Halloween, kids get candy, parents get Jello shots or beer, dogs get dog treats.
That said, the median home price, including condos and townhomes, in our town is like $775,000. The median--not average--detached single-family house price is $930,000 right now. Basically, there's not a lot of affordable starter homes in our area anymore.
We had a dip because of Covid, but yeah, this past Halloween was busy, we have a lot of young families in our neighborhood. Although we’re in the $250k-$300k range here.
Median home price in my area is probably $400k. Our streets look like this at Halloween. In front of some of the more popular houses, the crowd is shoulder to shoulder, curb to curb. We’ve actually lost people in our group before because if the crowds.
I live in an area where tons of people do both trunk or treating and trick or treating, and I've literally never heard anyone express that they do trunk or treats because suburbia is dangerous. I see this constantly trotted out on Reddit but haven't encountered it in real life. It's just a way to get together with people and get candy and have fun.
Trick or treating is awkward in my neighborhood. Lots of people aren't home because they're out trick or treating with their own kids, others are old and curmudgeonly and don't answer the door, others leave candy and stuff on the steps so they don't have to answer the door, and some actually answer the door and seem happy about it. Like, it's fine, my kid likes it, but I think it's become massively romanticized for some reason.
Yep! Also, trunk-or-treating is usually in addition to, not instead of, trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. There’s always tons of trunk-or-treats at locations around where I live in the week or so leading up to Halloween. So the kids get to dress up and go out multiple times for candy.
It’s nice for families with really young kids too, since the kids can’t walk far and they get to see a lot more decorations. Plus those giving out candy get really creative decorating their “trunk” area and often set up fun games for the kids.
I dunno, it’s been a pretty nice thing to have in my experience.
Yeah, because they aren't even remotely the same thing as they used to be. Technically my city has a mall too, but it has like 3 stores, a movie theater, and a gym. Malls used to be packed with stores, had a food court with multiple options, and an arcade. Teens don't go to them anymore because there's nothing there. It's simply not the same thing and pretending it is is ridiculous.
Malls still exist, people just don’t go there as much. Culture is different. We would go to arcades, now kids don’t need to with awesome video game systems.
Other than some of the really big malls most malls that still exist have very few stores and none of them that young people would want to go to. My city technically has a mall, but there are like 3 or 4 stores (none of them being a store a teenager would want to go to), a theater, and a gym. There's not arcade, food court, or interesting stores that younger people would want to go into.
There are still some major malls in large cities that are similar to the old malls, but they used to be in every city and were packed with people. You can't really compare malls today to malls in the '80s and '90s.
Oh I misread above. That is interesting. I actually learned something from Reddit. Thank you.
My neighborhood was a suburb originally before the city grew around it but it's always had many "third places". I have never been to a suburb that didn't have shops, parks, restaurants, libraries, ect. Who would choose to move into such a poorly designed community?
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u/Ostiethegnome 17d ago
Suburbs feel empty because you have to drive everywhere, and there are few if any third spaces you can go to where there is no expectation to spend money.