Never Retire: The Grass IS Greener In Spain

Why the US is falling apart—America built freeways and fear; Spain built community

Let’s stop sugarcoating it. The grass is greener in Spain—and, for that matter, much of Europe and the rest of the world.

It hit me particularly hard this weekend and this morning.

The pathetic state of affairs in the United States underscores the reality that life abroad—particularly in Spain—is simply better designed, better lived, and better aligned with human sanity.

I didn’t start to question quality of life in the US only after I migrated to Spain. It began shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 1999 and took an interest in American cities. I enrolled in an urban studies program at SF State in 2002 and quickly realized that trying to make these places great would be a neverending fight. So I dropped out of my PhD program in 2008 and started to write.

I have been railing against the short stick the American government and its brainwashed followers give US cities—how they have perverted the so-called American dream—ever since. But I never stopped loving places like San Francisco and Boston, even as I discovered something else.

The more I researched and studied urban planning, the more I realized that American cities lack. Simply put, cities—even the so-called “great” ones—in the US just don’t work, which is why so many urban planning types suffer from European envy.

They talk about the way things are in Europe’s never-ending list of truly great cities, wishing and hoping that US cities could catch up. But—thanks largely to terrible politics, corporate greed, and the subsequent dominance of the automobile—they never have and never will.

And that couldn’t be clearer than it is today.

People talk about history repeating itself all of the time. But it’s actually happening in so many ways in what has become a dysfunctional, if not wholly and completely unlivable United States of America.

If you live there right now, you’re probably like—well, I live n the US and, while it’s bad, it’s not that bad. To that I say—you have never lived here—in Spain—and you only feel this way for two reasons.

One—because you have to. You have no choice but to accept and—to some extent—normalize what you see occurring around you in the US because—without the rationalization—you would walk around in a constant state of depression. Soldiering through the day-to-day with anything resembling a positive attitude is little more than a coping mechanism.

I know because I did this amid the hostile mess Los Angeles has become. I have personal experience with making the best of it when you have no choice. But—ultimately—I made plans to get the hell out.

Two—because you “can’t” move for whatever reason or you don’t know any better.

This Medium article by Elizabeth Silleck La Rue nailed the “can’t” part:

There’s a strange thing that happens when you begin to write publicly about emigrating from the US.

Without fail, people jump into the comments, dripping with bitterness, to tell you that in their specific situation, emigration is inaccessible to them…

Let me be clear — if someone’s first reaction to the idea of emigrating from the US is “I can’t,” they are probably not going to do it…

Nevertheless, very few hurdles truly rise to the level of “can’t.”

There is no utopia. Every country will have problems. Every country will have dangers, inconveniences, barriers, and complications. Just like the US does. And perhaps, that’s reason enough to stay put, especially for people who are not exposed to the danger of persecution and targeting by MAGA.

That is fine. Stay, by all means. But jumping all over other people who have emigrated — especially those who faced the same barriers and did it anyway — is quite low-vibe and disingenuous when one hasn’t even explored their options in a serious way.

If you don’t want to emigrate, don’t. If you can’t muster the strength or accept the sacrifice that would be required to make it happen, then don’t…

As for the you don’t know any better part, that’s not a putdown. That’s just real talk.

It’s hard to really appreciate how different and how much better day-to-day life is in—using my example—Valencia than in any square meter of the United States unless you have lived it. It’s just objective fact that extends to any number of other countries around the world, particularly, for our purposes, Europe.

And that difference isn’t just lifestyle—it’s design.

In Valencia—

• You don’t have to worry about getting shot or robbed. You can go out at night—by yourself even—without thinking twice.

• You don’t have to worry about getting run over by a car, screamed at by a driver, or involved in really any other aggressive or hostile interaction.

• Everything you need—and more—is within a 5-to-10-minute walk or bike ride from where you live. You can take reliable, well-connected public transit. You can bike or take the train to neighboring cities and towns with ease. You don’t need a car.

• So much of this what you need and more is food. High-quality, locally- and regionally-produced, reasonably priced food you can buy in municipal markets and any number of shops and stores to cook at home. The same ingredients many of the restaurants, bars, and cafés you go to also use.

• If you’re super young or super old, you can participate in a vibrant daily public social life that rarely stops in the streets, plazas, and terraces.

• We won’t even talk about seemingly higher-level stuff like access to healthcare.

If you haven’t known these things, you tend to think they can’t be true.

That I am romanticizing Spain.

Sometimes—as I actually see this life in action every minute of every single day because I am living it—I almost can’t believe it’s true. Because it takes time to shake the indoctrination you experience when you spend a significant portion of your life in the United States.

When my wife’s daughter walked the streets of our neighborhood at one in the morning, we looked at each other and could not get over the fact that it never dawned on us to be concerned. Because there was zero reason for concern. She was merely existing as a young woman in an urban theater built for accessibility, vibrancy, and safety.

So many of the things that make Spain better are things most Americans have never experienced—or only on vacation, which makes them treat walkability like Disneyland rather than what it actually is: a daily, life-changing foundation for well-being.

As evidenced by places like Downtown Disney and stale New Urbanist developments, the United States treats good city building like a tourist attraction—as something to gawk at and enjoy as an escape from your out of scale and car dependent, day-to-day grind.

There’s also a large segment of the population that lacks education and exposure and has a tendency to be transfixed by populist tropes. This is exactly where the history repeating itself part comes in.

Make no mistake—US cities suck, especially when you compare them to European ones.

But they are not war zones.

Many—by American standards—are lively places with streets full of shops, packed bars, and restaurants where it can be tough to get a table. The problems are purely structural—rooted in a mix of US political and economic history and bad urban planning. Any self-respecting nation that actually cares for its people with even an ounce of will could turn the ship around. The way—for example—Paris and London have by making cycling primary modes of transportation.

But the United States lost its will and stopped having respect for itself a long time ago. Now, it deserves and—around the world—receives no respect. Calling cities war zones and making the uneducated masses—some of whom should know better—believe that this lie warrants increased policing with actual troops. These aren’t tactics genuinely aimed at making US cities better places to live—meaningful urban planning policy could do that—they’re meant to stifle and prepare for dissent, not to mention set the stage for Trump to hang onto power in 2028.

It will take a seismic change—or a full-blown political and military coup—for 2028 not to turn the United States into the kind of “third world” nation Trump projects when he speaks.

Take it down a level and it seems much less important, but it still matters. History is repeating itself in our cities beyond the nonsensical war zone rhetoric.

In the 1930s and 1940s, GM, Standard Oil, and other corporations—with what amounted to support from the US government—systematically ripped out public transportation infrastructure to establish the role of the car and the proliferation of suburbia.

Today, the government is repeating history by rolling back the little progress the US has made from an urban planning perspective:

President Donald Trump’s transportation department has been pulling back grants already announced for recreational trails and bicycle lanes, telling local officials their projects fail to promote road capacity or are “hostile to motor vehicles.”

Many of the people who voted this administration in view the 15-minute city—where everything you need is within a 15-minute, non-car trip—as a conspiracy to control the masses. They’re good with the military in Portland. Because they believe the lie that Portland is the place that’s unlivable when the reality is that it’s one of the cities in the US with actual functioning neighborhoods—Nob Hill, the Pearl District, Mississippi Avenue, Ladd’s Addition—that should serve as a model for the rest of the increasingly worthless nation.

It’s a cartoon that’s nearly impossible to make sense of until you step back and call it what it really is.

The US isn’t collapsing by accident—it’s collapsing by design.

Spain isn’t perfect, but it’s coherent. It was built around proximity, public life, and respect for the collective good—and somehow, it never lost the thread.

The United States did. It once had the same raw ingredients—righteous ideals, traditional urban design, and the ambition to build places worthy of those ideals. But it traded them away—piece by piece—for the cheap illusion of progress. It turned the public realm into private profit, replaced civic pride with despicable rhetoric, and convinced its citizens that isolation was freedom.

Spain, meanwhile, kept faith with the fundamentals: density, dignity, and connection. The US bulldozed its neighborhoods for freeways; Spain kept building plazas. One country still believes in people; the other builds systems that treat them like obstacles.

That’s the real divide. Not old versus new. Not Europe versus America. But nations that design for humanity versus ones that design for control.

Another Never Retire field note is coming later this week—but I wanted to drop this one first. Because sometimes you have to stop explaining and just call it what it is.

Never Retire: What Transportation—and Olive Oil—Really Costs in Spain