
Why suburbia sucks - goodJobWalrus
http://qz.com/698928/why-suburbia-sucks/?utm_source=qzfb
======
rdtsc
It might be unpopular here, and I feel slightly guilty saying it, but I like
suburbia.

Mine has wide streets, plenty of tall trees, it is quiet. I like flowers in my
yard, etc. I like my neighbors, but they are not within literally an arms
length on each side of me every day.

Unlike probably most people here who grew up in suburbs, then perhaps started
to hate it and moved to one of the coasts, to a city, I grew up in a city in
an apartment. Proximity to stores, public transport and being able to walk is
nice. But crime, full public transport during rush hour, noisy neighbors, or
simply being flooded by neighbors from the top, crowding, dirty streets, etc.
Even grocery shopping was annoying, yeah could walk to the store, but couldn't
bring home a car trunk's worth and not worry about for another week.

So rationally, on a general scale, I can understand why suburbia sucks. But as
an individual, I don't plan on moving to a city, the trade-offs are not adding
up for me.

~~~
zippergz
I agree. I have lived in cities and in the suburbs, and I greatly prefer the
suburbs. I also feel that many of the points in the article make unwarranted
assumptions about priorities, or are based on opinion. _European cities feel
“cozy” and “charming” is because they provide a feeling of enclosure, which
humans want because it gives them with a coherent sense of place, like rooms
in a house._ You may want the feeling of enclosure, but I don't. Again, I've
lived in both. I don't feel more "cozy" or comfortable in an urban setting.
This is just one of several examples.

My biggest frustration about articles on this topic is how much they assume we
all want the same thing, or agree on what is good and bad. Fact-based
arguments like environmental impacts are great. But treating "ugly," "soul
crushing" and "isolating" as absolutes isn't very productive.

~~~
WildUtah
"My biggest frustration about articles on this topic is how much they assume
we all want the same thing"

It could be clearer but the opening paragraphs talk about how nearly
everything in America is suburban. There is no choice for people that want to
live in a city. That's because it's illegal to build anything except suburbia.

We'd all like a choice. Developers could build suburbia for you and a city for
me. But that's not legal and that is what causes the problem.

A few older areas exist from before New Deal development laws mandated
suburbia in the 1930s. And places like San Francisco and New York are insanely
expensive because about half of us want to live there and they haven't been
allowed to build any more of it for seventy years while the population
tripled.

~~~
abalashov
Author here - you nailed it. There's no useful discussing to be had about
personal preferences when practically the entire country, notwithstanding a
very small handful of places, is built as described in the artifice.

And as prevailing zoning laws, building rules and perverse government
incentives currently stand, it is either outright illegal or massively
uneconomical (thanks to the distortions) to build anything but Los Angeles.

When we have the option for urban living, then we can talk about who wants to
live where. As it stands, the usual highway schlock is all the vast majority
of us get.

------
prostoalex
The author does a decent job describing the suburbian plight, but doesn't
delve into the reasons _why_ deep enough. An older article ascribes suburbian
development to peculiarities of US economic policy:

[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-
conservative...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-conservative-
case-against-the-suburbs/)

"The sad reality is that, despite the marketing, the suburbs were never about
creating household wealth; they were about creating growth on the cheap. They
were born under a Keynesian regime that counted growth from government
spending as equivalent to that coming from private investment. Aggressive
horizontal expansion of our cities allowed us to consistently hit federal GDP
and unemployment targets with little sophistication and few difficult choices.

That we were pawning off the enormous long-term liabilities for serving and
maintaining all of these widely dispersed systems onto local taxpayers–after
plying municipalities with all the subsidies, pork spending, and ribbon
cuttings needed to make it happen–didn’t seem to enter our collective
consciousness. When all those miles of frontage roads, sewer and water pipes,
and sidewalks fall into disrepair–as they inevitably will in every suburb–very
little of it will be fixed. The wealth necessary to do so just isn’t there."

~~~
gnaritas
Whenever you see conservatives complaining about anything related to the
Keynesian regime, you can bet you're reading a bunch of horse-shit with little
if any basis in fact.

Government policies didn't create suburbs, people trying to get out of cities
did, not everyone likes city life and it's cheaper to live further out than it
is in the city. Suburbs are the natural result of a car culture and plentiful
land to build on. No Keynesian conspiracies required.

~~~
rjbwork
Gotta disagree. The easiest example to look at is the Interstate Highway
System. They busted up downtowns and put giant highways through them so people
could get to and from the suburbs and the cities. Baltimore, Atlanta, LA, DC,
Boston, DFW, NO, etc. all have peculiarly similar interstate structures.

~~~
gnaritas
I think you're confusing highways and freeways, the Interstate Highway System
has nothing to do with suburbs, it connects cities to each other. And cities
build freeways because locals demand them, because they don't want to live in
the city. That's not government creating suburbs, that's government responding
to the desire for suburbs. Suburban sprawl tends to happen first, and then
freeways are built to connect them to the city faster.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Cities don't build freeways, the feds build freeways (sometimes the state will
build a highway, but it's mostly feds).

~~~
gnaritas
Correction noted, but the funding source doesn't change my point. Demand
drives the building of city freeways, the freeways don't create the sprawl,
the sprawl creates the demand for freeways.

------
alienth
To each their own. I've lived in cities and suburbs, and I personally greatly
prefer the latter. I'm not alone - I promise.

It's fine if some, or even most, think that suburbia is hell on earth.
Criticize suburbia all you like. Don't live there. Go someplace you enjoy.
Also, try not to assume that your feeling on this matter is objectively
correct.

~~~
TulliusCicero
My biggest problem is that I like neither very dense urban living, nor low-
density, car-dependent suburbia. Thanks to poorly-designed zoning, the US
doesn't have much "in-between" housing or density, and that's a shame. See:
[http://missingmiddlehousing.com/](http://missingmiddlehousing.com/)

------
paul_f
Suburbia is popular because people enjoy living in suburbia. It's annoying
when people write articles like this and don't bother to talk to people who
live there and find out why.

~~~
Tiktaalik
Whether they enjoy it or not, I don't think many people have had an actual
real choice about whether or not to live in suburbia.

For one thing in most North American cities it is the default and inescapable
urban planning norm. There's no alternative. If someone cloned a dense and
walkable European town nearby I'd choose to live there, but most towns around
me are the same generic strip mall suburbs.

There are a handful of North American cities with vibrant residential cores or
inner neighbourhoods that one could choose to live in, but ultimately for most
it's not sustainable. In cities such as SF and Vancouver, attainable housing
is in the multi-unit condo form which is not often suitable for growing
families. What ground oriented housing exists is for multi-millionaires.
Inevitably if one chooses to have a family the suburb is a forced choice.

------
niftich
Classic suburbia was desirable because it promised living in a newer house
with a private yard and a garage, on a low-traffic street, in an ethnically
and socioeconomically homogenous neighborhood zoned to a well-performing
school. Automobile dependence was a feature to empower the car-owning
suburbanite and to restrict the casual exfiltration of people from the city
into the suburbs. (These fears, that good-for-nothings will take public
transit to cause trouble in the suburbs crop up to this day.)

As suburbs age, their advantages decline. The houses are no longer new,
traffic (on all but the leaf-node cul-de-sacs) has increased. When one suburb
is built out, the urban area spreads outward, and newer suburbs and exurbs are
created. Those that can afford to move do so, slowly decreasing the average
income of the neighborhood, which correlates strongly with school performance.
Desirability keeps declining in turn.

Some suburbs can avoid this fate by becoming large employment centers, and
then we call them edge cities instead (e.g. Irvine, Tysons, Bloomington).

------
kylec
As someone who lives, and prefers to live, a car-centric lifestyle (as opposed
to walking or taking public transportation), most of the points in this
article don't bother me. I think this is just another rehash of the "cars are
bad" argument that keeps making the rounds.

~~~
leetNightshade
I don't think he's saying cars are bad, he's pointing out lots of flaws in the
design of roads and living areas. He's bringing up the inefficiencies that
lifestyle has, suburbia he argues brings a lot of inefficiencies.

I LOVE driving. But Los Angeles is complete shit due to the suburban sprawl,
lack of a well designed connectors and ramps, lack of well designed roadways
for the throughput, etc. Los Angeles is a prime example of why Suburbia sucks.
This article hits all the right points.

There's a lot of artificial inefficiencies we've imposed on ourselves due to
lack of forethought, stubbornness, resistance to change, or many other
reasons. Sadly, it's impossible to fix anything in a quick manner.

------
balls187
When I was single-ish, I loved living in the heart of Seattle.

Now that I have a family, I really love living in the burbs, for pretty much
all the reasons that irritated me about living in the heart of a big city.
Having a young infant really changed my priorities.

------
amyjess
Sorry, but I prefer suburbia over everything else, and I can't stand to live
in a city.

I like wide-open spaces, a lack of noise, and cheap spacious housing. Cities
just make me claustrophobic, and I can't stand it. I absolutely cannot
tolerate having anyone else live above or below me, and noise drives me up the
wall like nothing else. I've got a big-ass house for considerably less than $1
per square foot per month, I have no noise, and I like the aesthetics of the
area around me. Also, the crime rate is very low, and I don't have homeless
people constantly demanding I give them money and then shouting epithets at me
when they find out I don't carry cash (that happened multiple times a day back
when I used to work downtown; it hasn't happened even once since I started
working in the suburbs again).

All in all, cities are nice places to play tourist and visit in small doses,
but I'd rather live in the suburbs.

Edit: I'll also add that I'm openly LGBT, and I've heard horror stories from
other LGBT people, even those who live in very liberal cities, about some of
the things that get shouted at them on the street in urban environments. Even
in a liberal place like Boston, you're going to have punks shouting slurs at
you on the street if you're openly LGBT, yet I live in suburban Texas and
nobody has shouted a single homophobic or transphobic epithet at me in the
suburbs. Everyone is polite and friendly to me. I feel safe here. I don't care
if it's just an act and they're just being polite to my face because they're
taught to be polite to everyone even though they're going to talk about me
behind my back; just as long as I don't have to hear the abuse, I'm fine.

------
ThrustVectoring
Suburbia represents a few trillion dollars worth of malinvestment, IMHO. You
can even trace the spread of suburbs back to the subsidies and incentives that
created them. The tax deduction on mortgages, along with Fannie Mae et al,
were explicitly designed to increase home ownership. Extraneous housing will
get built in that environment, and the only question is where. Undeveloped
areas have a much easier time giving concessions to developers, so that's
where they're going to build.

Overall, the fix is some combination of a land-value tax, anti-NIMBY
ordinances, subsidy removal, and infrastructure downgrades. Explanations for
each:

Land-value tax: the unimproved value of land is approximately equal to the
value created by building infrastructure and creating valuable economic areas.
This aligns incentives better than existing tax structures, and has various
other benefits that economists really like.

Anti-NIMBY: the overall effect of NIMBY policies is two-fold - it makes
undeveloped areas relatively more attractive, and it enriches current
residents of an area at the expense of society as a whole.

Subsidy removal: often, when silly things are happening, it's because there's
a subsidy or tax reason that boils down to "we are willing to pay you to do
silly things". It's just as true for building suburbs as it is for removing
windows from vans, shipping them from Germany to the US, and then re-
installing those windows.

Infrastructure downgrades: a certain intensity of land use makes only so much
infrastructure make sense. If there's not enough people benefiting from a road
to pay for asphalt, it needs to be gravel. Sucks for the people there, but
it's even less fair for everyone else to pay for their asphalt privileges.

------
rconti
"Reasons that this particular author hates cars" is a bit more like it.

Of course, if you pick the worst of everything of suburbia, you can "prove"
that it sucks. But the author utterly fails on a large number of points, such
as proving that humans like to feel enclosed by buildings on both sides such
as on Saint-Germain, and that they utterly hate being able to actually see the
sky like in the "middle of nowhere". And hey, he hates GarageHouses because
they worship at the altar of the car. How terrible. Tsk, tsk. Of course he
hates that ugly house's façade, but he's unable to prove that tacky design is
a necessary consequence of suburbs.

I live in a suburb. The houses are not all the same. I love cars and
motorcycles; we've got 4 motorized vehicles at the moment. None of them fit in
the garage because we don't have some absurd cookie cutter house. We don't
have an absurd cookie cutter house, because that doesn't fit our aesthetic.

We live in a relatively quiet neighborhood that is, yes, zoned residential,
but we're also a block from restaurants and a bar and a grocery store. We
don't have winding meandering streets that get you lost; we're literally 2
blocks from the freeway.

Oh, and I can and do bike a few miles to work despite the fact that public
transit sucks.

I love visiting cities, but could never live in one. Guess what? I don't want
shared walls. I don't want to have to worry about where I'm going to park my
cars or whether the windows will be intact when I return, or whether I'll be
kept awake by the sounds of mixed-use blissful commerce happening beneath me.

He's right about so many things but just falls victim to boring old tropes. I
also lived almost-spitting-distance to a grocery store in an apartment once.
Thanks to a 10ft high brick wall, I had to walk 5 minutes out of the complex,
5 minutes around, and 5 minutes back in the direction of the store; 15 minutes
to go what was really a few hundred feet as the crow flies. Of course it's
absurd, so I didn't keep living there. But this does not make suburbs hell. It
makes poor design choices hell.

~~~
amyjess
I agree with you on all points.

> "Reasons that this particular author hates cars" is a bit more like it.

Yep. Reading the article, every time I read one of his numbered points, I just
thought "But that's a good thing". They only make sense as negatives if you
already have an irrational hate for cars.

> And hey, he hates GarageHouses because they worship at the altar of the car.
> How terrible. Tsk, tsk.

On a related note, I found the author's rant about alleys utterly nonsensical.

I live in the suburbs of Dallas, where alleys are everywhere. Most suburban
neighborhoods here have large networks of alleys where trash cans are located
and garages empty out.

------
randallsquared
Suburbs are personal space for the home.

If, out in public, you feel uncomfortable when someone you don't know stands
close enough that you could touch elbows with them, you may prefer suburbs to
density.

If, when you hear someone unexpectedly yelling nearby, your first reaction is
"let's see what the trouble is" rather than "let's see what the excitement
is", you may prefer suburbs to density.

If you would prefer scheduling to spontaneity in interactions with people you
don't live with, you may prefer suburbs to density.

If you would like to avoid learning to sleep through sirens and yelling, you
may prefer suburbs to density.

If you laughed when you read "People feel vulnerable and uncomfortable in open
areas with ill-defined margins.", you may prefer suburbs. ;)

On that last: I think it really sums up the whole article that they present
those two images in section 6 and then try to explain why "people" feel more
at ease with the Saint-Germain photo. They don't try to explain why some
people prefer wide open spaces, and I get the impression it's because they
don't really believe anyone does. All these people are really seeking out
homes to buy in places they know they'll be unhappy? But maybe that isn't it.

Oh, wait, they do consider that people actually say they like having more
space, in 7. They don't seem to believe it, though, remarking that it's
important how usable the space is. But it really isn't: in fact, for those of
us who like lots of personal space, having large nearby areas which are
clearly unsuitable for most human activity helps put us at ease. If you see an
adult in a drainage ditch, there is a short list of reasons why they'd be
there, and any of those reasons justifies becoming involved to see if they
need help, or whatever. If you live in a dense city and someone is hanging out
next to your window, which is an arm's length from the sidewalk, they could be
trying to open it, or... it could be any hour of any day. If you live in the
pictured suburbs and someone is hanging out next to your window, there's less
uncertainty.

> useless frontages, pointless greenspace between compatible land uses, as
> well as chain-link fences, concrete barriers, and drainage pits

Complaining that the moat isn't chlorinated and has smelly monsters in it
misses the actual purpose of the moat.

There's a lot to like about cities, but a lot to dislike as well, and those
things push a lot of people to the suburbs.

------
dionidium
His last point about regional planning can't be emphasized enough. The city I
live in is entirely independent of its surrounding county, which itself is a
patchwork of incorporated and unincorporated municipalities (and where the
vast majority of people choose to live). This bifurcation causes all sorts of
fundamental planning issues that harm the region.

------
st3v3r
You know, I've never liked articles which take the position that X sucks, or
tries to say that X sucks. There are some things that don't really have any
redeeming qualities, but those things are few and far between. Most of the
time it's just that this person doesn't like it. I'm not much of a fan of
suburbia either, but there are plenty of others who do like what suburbia
offers, and don't like densely urban areas.

~~~
TillE
Everything that people "like" about American suburbia, rural Germany (for
example) is better at. Big houses with big yards, but just a quick trip from
an actual town, and not much further from some kind of city.

It's a garbage design in just about every way. A huge mistake.

~~~
drewrv
I visited rural Holland as a teenager and my mind was blown by the fact that
you could live somewhere rural yet get around by bicycle. Most Americans don't
know what they're missing.

~~~
eric_the_read
I love the netherlands! It's a lovely country, full of fantastic people and
tasty treats. I lived there more than 30 years ago, and I still miss
poffertjes and lament to all and sundry the lack of fresh stroopwafels in the
US.

But it's roughly the size of the Front Range in Colorado. It's _tiny_. Serious
question: how many places in .nl are > 10km from a city of moderate size? I'm
going out on a limb here and suggesting "not many".

------
ArkyBeagle
Accusing suburbs of being lassez-faire is quite a miss, I think. There is
quite a bit of subsidy, there are lobby groups for it, the very act of zoning
itself is extremely political and the rents exploitation arrangement is
quite...vivid. Throw in HOAs ( which are written into deed contracts ) and
it's significantly less than free.

The George Romney inspired expansion away from the 20% down, 30 year mortgage
to what ended in 2008 was an effort to tie people down to a mortgage for
reasons of, roughly, social control. If you read Haber & Calomiris "Fragile By
Design" \- they're quite conservative - you get a better picture of it.

I love the suburbs. Because if I play my cards right, I get to be a
beneficiary to much of all that.

------
notacoward
This almost exactly mirrors the points made by _Suburban Nation_ in 2000. If
you're truly interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading the original
instead of the online Cliff Notes.

~~~
jseliger
The unfortunate part is that building the kinds of cities in which many people
would like to live is illegal in much of the U.S.:
[http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-
ebook/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-
ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO) or see Edward Glaeser's _The Triumph of the City_.

------
fiatmoney
Suburbia is a defensive design. Big houses & lots, and lack of public
transport, means that it tends to be more expensive and requires reliable
access to a car. Low density means that blight doesn't spread as quickly, and
geographically-selected organizations (in particular school districts) don't
change as quickly, and they're also selecting membership from the same groups
that can afford the real estate and transport. HOAs explicitly prioritize
maintaining property values.

This all selects for higher-quality neighbors.

There are ways to achieve this in urban settings, but it tends to require more
direct, onerous, and legally iffy regulation.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Wealthier neighbors. You meant to say wealthier.

~~~
fiatmoney
No, I didn't. The salient aspect is "nice" neighbors; people like poor
teachers, or unemployed kids of existing residents, are just fine. Things like
HOAs are particularly brutally enforced in poorer neighborhoods attempting to
become or stay "nice" (eg, in black but predominantly middle class
neighborhoods).

------
ocdtrekkie
It "sucks", stated as a fact. But so many people voluntarily choose to live
there.

~~~
ch4s3
"Choose" is an interesting word. School funding is largely based on district
property values in the US, so when you build enclaves of $400k homes that ends
up being where the only good schools in the area are. Hard not to choose that
if you have kids. Mortgage interest deductions also encourage the choice. The
development model for suburbs also passes along the cost of infrastructure, so
that it isn't necessary for buyers to pay for it in the form of property
taxes. Local governments just approve more suburbs to pay off old
infrastructure debt, until they eventually default and leave the state with
the debt. It's easy to choose infrastructure someone else pays for. Roads into
and through suburbs are paid for out of states' general funds to the tune of
70+%, again, easy to choose that.

~~~
johan_larson
I grew up in the suburbs and have as an adult lived in everything from
traditional suburbs to a dense inner city. If I had the choice, I'd happily
move back to the suburbs. Suburbs are easy to get around (assuming you have a
car) and there's plenty of privacy. There's little of the cheek-by-jowl
cramming together of people that you find in dense cities.

I don't really know what people mean when they say suburbs are dull. There
always seemed to be plenty of options everywhere I lived, conveniently
accessible by car. Are the people who complain about this stuff real oddballs
who need weird stuff you can only find in the biggest of cities, or are they
congenitally hostile to driving?

~~~
amyjess
> There always seemed to be plenty of options everywhere I lived, conveniently
> accessible by car. Are the people who complain about this stuff real
> oddballs who need weird stuff you can only find in the biggest of cities, or
> are they congenitally hostile to driving?

What's funny is that, in Dallas, all the interesting restaurants in the
suburbs.

Want an authentic Sichuanese restaurant? Looking for a Cantonese barbecue
joint? Or maybe an Indian place that serves real chaat? Or how about a nice
steaming bowl of pho? In Dallas, you'll find all of these in strip malls in
the suburbs (in fact, we have a pho joint on almost every street corner in
some parts of the burbs), while food in the city core consists of a mixture of
yuppie bars, restaurants that only appeal to white hipsters, and fast-food
joints aimed at the people who commute to downtown.

Every single Asian demographic in the Dallas area has chosen the suburbs over
the city, leaving Downtown and Uptown to white yuppies and hipsters.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
I must sound like an alien, but what is suburbia? How do I know if I live
there?

~~~
johan_larson
To a first approximation, if you are living in an area where most people live
in separate single-family homes, but you are not surrounded by fields or
orchards, you are living in a suburb.

If you are surrounded by fields, you're in a rural environment. If people
around you live in multi-family structures, you are in an urban environment.

I'm sure there are more formal definitions, too.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Ok I am in them, and it doesn't suck that much. Sometimes I wish there were
more fields though, and other times I'm glad to have a grocery store nearby.

------
sboak
James Howard Kunstler gave an incredibly sharp, funny talk called "The ghastly
tragedy of the suburbs" on both the history and design problems of the
suburbs.
[https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...](https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia?language=en)

------
poozer305
Pretty sure this is copied from another article. Remember seeing this exact
same post a month ago or so on here.

~~~
kylec
[https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-
sucks/](https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11655308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11655308)

------
kasey_junk
Suburbia is too broad a category for meaningful conversations to happen
around. I assure you the low crime/good school stereotype for instance is not
universal.

------
AnimalMuppet
Why do I prefer suburbia? Because I found out that my family life was more
peaceful when each child had their own bedroom. I can't afford that downtown.

~~~
abalashov
Does being unable to afford downtown equate to preferring suburbia?

------
thescriptkiddie
I'm not usually a fan of articles about "Why X Sucks", because almost
invariably I think X doesn't suck as much as the author thinks. It's like I'm
hard-wired to disagree with any headline that tries to make an assertion. But
this is one case where I think we can all unequivocally agree that suburbia
_sucks_ in a way so profound that it escapes description.

------
combatentropy
This reminds me of one of Paul Graham's essays, "Made in USA,"
[http://paulgraham.com/usa.html](http://paulgraham.com/usa.html), where a
friend visiting from Italy remarks that American cities are so ugly. He goes
on to explore what America is good at and what it is not so good at.

------
pnathan
As I ponder the suburban/urban/rural matter, I come to a pretty blunt
conclusion - in order to have a functioning society over the next 150 years,
we need to effectively outlaw exurbs and suburbs or make them _prohibitively_
expensive.

We need to prioritize solving climate change; prioritize effective resource
distribution; prioritize central management at the provincial/federal level;
prioritize integrations of humanity into high-density regions. This will boost
effectiveness of the tax dollar per square mile, as well as collocating more
tax dollars in census zones, so having _more_ dollars per mile. Vast amounts
of functionally unsustainable infrastructure - from roads, to schools, to
governmental structures have been built that is not fundable at the level we
are asking it to perform at.

This needs to change at the federal level, and aggressively.

Fundamentally there are repeated precedents in US history for this kind of
centralized planning: the two big waves previously are homesteading and
suburban funding via Fannie/Freddie and post-WW2 home loans. The US needs to
do it again.

Having lived in the suburb and rural worlds, I understand their viewpoint -
and it is valid, but doesn't have the mathmatics to sustain it - but my
perspective is that a profound slow-moving crisis is upon us; the only real
solution is to start shutting down the suburbs and urbanize as hard as
possible.

We're not in the 1890s or the 1950s anymore; our housing policy needs to
address the functioning reality of 2016 and the challenges we face today.

~~~
niftich
I don't believe the free market is the solution to everything, but in this
case the market already solve this. As suburbs age and become crowded people
move further out, or back into the urban core. If a particular local
government jurisdiction doesn't have enough revenue to maintain or expand
roads, schools, water and sewer service, it will try to annex more land, or
change its zoning and offer incentives stimulate higher-revenue uses than
residential. If the concern is about agricultural or forest land being taken
for development, perhaps our economic system doesn't sufficiently reward those
land uses (yet).

~~~
TulliusCicero
You're right that the suburban unsustainability will eventually solve the
issue, but it'll cause a lot of misery in the meantime. Better to have avoided
the problem in the first place.

------
scythe
I think one reason that suburbia exists in America in its present form is that
local politics is corrupt everywhere. The two-party system degenerates into a
one-party system in any city where local public opinion is strongly left (most
coastal cities) or right (Deep South) of the American body politic. There are
some advantages to two-party systems, but the consensus opinion among
political scientists is that one-party democracy is a lie. The result is
balkanization, as dissatisfaction with local politics causes large
municipalities to decline as wealthy individuals move to smaller
municipalities with more responsive governments. You can watch this happen in
real-time if you pay attention to discussions on NextDoor or participate in
local politics in most other ways.

For an example I'm familiar with, let's look at San Jose. It starts with this
unelected guy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann)

"They say San José is going to become another Los Angeles. Believe me, I'm
going to do everything in my power to make that come true."

This led to a huge backlash in 1962 and the eventual election of anti-
development mayor Norman Y. Mineta. As people fled San Jose, revenues
declined; in 1983, the San Jose School District went bankrupt.

If you go to any city in the country -- San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami,
New York, Austin, whatever -- you'll hear constant complaints about corruption
and a lack of effective political participation. It's everywhere, and it's
been getting steadily worse since the Southern Strategy created the modern
two-party miasma.

