
The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme - hammerdr
http://www.underpaidgenius.com/post/6948964696
======
qjz
Buried in the hyperbole is this nugget of truth:

 _It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the
automobile._

City, suburb, whatever the residential setting, this is the true enemy of
creating a network of livable communities. Any jogger, cyclist or volksmarcher
can tell you that a continuous green ribbon connecting communities enhances
the quality of life many times over. It's a crime that road/highway
development rarely takes this into consideration, especially when some of the
nicest trails I ride go alongside or beneath some of the busiest roads in my
metropolitan area. A well-planned paved trail can can offer a cycling commute
comparable to that of an automobile (sometimes even shorter), only far more
pleasant and healthier. Unfortunately, sharing the road with cars in any
metropolitan or suburban area is a life-threatening experience.

~~~
necubi
I have trouble believing that simply making cycling more attractive will be
enough to deal with the massive transportation problems that suburbs (and more
so exurbs) create. No matter how nice the trails are, most people will not
communicate by bike or walking.

The solution is to pack people more densely in mixed-use communities. Ideally
most people would have their necessities within walking distance (grocery
store, drug store, restaurants, movie theatre, bank, etc.) and public
transportation to everything else, including work. Both of these goals can
only be implemented affordably if population densities are high.

~~~
qjz
Experience tells me you're wrong. I know people who walked one block to work
every day of their lives, only to be critically injured by passing cars or
trucks. I know plenty of of cyclists injured by buses pulling over to pick up
passengers, or even by parked cars suddenly opening doors. Population density
does not protect you from motor vehicle traffic density. Even bike lanes are
dangerous when the only barrier is a line of paint. There is no reason
pedestrians or cyclists need to be anywhere near motor vehicle traffic. Once
this becomes a principle of residential planning, communities become far more
liveable.

~~~
necubi
Those are anecdotes that don't address my main point, which is that there will
be no mass turn towards biking merely because it is made more pleasant.

I offer as counterpoint Santa Cruz, CA, where I grew up. It's hard to imagine
a more bike friendly city: there are bike lanes on nearly every road, there
are special bike trails along many busy routes, and there are bike racks
everywhere. And a lot more people bike than in other places I've lived.

But it's still a tiny minority, and the vast, vast majority of people drive
everywhere because the city is too small and spread out to have decent public
transportation.

~~~
rdouble
No offense, but Santa Cruz is hardly a bicycling mecca. It's actually kind of
bad for cycling - downtown is too congested, Pacifc Avenue is a one way, the
east side is too spread out, once you go up the hills on the west side it's
also too spread out, there are a lot of small and winding busy roads with no
shoulder that you need to use to get from one part of the city to another, and
the cops are hostile to cyclists. Even in California, you don't need to
imagine a more bike friendly city, you can just visit Sacramento.

The parent is right - studies have shown that if you improve bicycling
infrastructure, you increase the number of bicycle commuters. However, you are
also correct... even in the American city with the most bicycle commuters
(Minneapolis) the total percentage of commuters using bicycles is less than
3%. Unfortunately, the density of American cities does not lend itself to bike
commuting. Even though it's not even ranked in the "best places to bike"
articles, I thought Manhattan was the easiest place in the USA to get around
on a bike.

~~~
sahaj
Sac is a good place to bike? Better than SC? You've got to be kidding me.
Davis - now that's a great place for biking.

~~~
david927
Exactly, but that proves the point: Davis is a not a suburb -- it's exactly
the kind of small town that started to disappear fifty years ago.

------
angdis
The damming problem is that not very many Americans are aware that there are
other ways to live besides suburbs where all work-commutes require driving,
every trip to the grocery store-- driving, everytime you take your kid to
school-- driving, soccer practice-- driving,
shopping/sports/gym/entertainment/socializing-- driving, civic participation
(if you even have time left)-- driving.

All these different destinations have been spread-out, miles apart, often
because of zoning requirements. This has been going on for so long that people
have forgotten that in the past, many families didn't even have cars and all
these destinations were within WALKING DISTANCE (or a street-car trip away).
And yet, people had lives that were just as fulfilling, perhaps more so than
they are today.

As the "New Urbanist" movement has been painstakingly re-discovering,
communities do need to have "a center" to them. In America, these were called
"main street" in Europe it is "the square". Whatever it is called, the idea is
to have worthwhile destinations that are short distances away from where many
people actually live. This creates environments that people care about and
grow to love and that serve their needs much better than forgettable box
stores surrounded by oceans of asphalt parking lots,

~~~
ajross
Honestly, no, that's completely wrong. There are in fact plenty of places like
that to live _in America_. And americans like them, in fact routinely paying
far higher prices for property there than they do in the awful suburbs.

Americans live in sprawl because they like it. It's simpler in many ways,
cheaper (often due to hidden subsidies, but cheaper nonetheless), and broadly
more attractive than life in the urban core is.

And this isn't a trait unique to Americans. I work, as do many here I suspect,
with a very international group of people. When european and east asians
arrive in the US and look for housing, where do they live? Yup, in the sprawl.

Basically, if you want to win this argument (and really, I'm on your side) you
have to get off the high horse. You can't just rely on people finally "getting
it" and moving back into the city.

~~~
wybo
I am moving into San Francisco from Europe, and exactly in this situation of
city versus further out.

By Americans SF is probably considered a car-free, and public transportation
friendly city, but as an European I am shocked to see that almost every street
more resembles a free-way than a living-space, and not just in SOMA. China-
town so far is the only bit that reminds me of an European city in terms of
it's street-life.

And I went looking for apartments/rooms to the north of Market street today,
and was shocked to see that what could have been an exciting urban
neighbourhood (and the only one built to human dimensions, within walking
distance from the financial district), is a shady place, the Tenderloin.

It seems a critical mass issue as well, to some extent. In Europe the exciting
young people live in the center, in human-sized communities, while in the US
even for Europeans that want to be in the city, the city is made unattractive
by crime, drugs, and trash in the street.

I guess I will be settling for something a bit further out, the Haight
neighbourhood, or something north of Chinatown (people there don't seem to put
their rentals/rooms on Craigslist), and a daily commute on the bus. Still
pretty central probably on US-terms, but almost a flight to the suburbs in
European terms...

(am still looking, if anyone has anything, mail at wybowiersma dot net)

~~~
wybo
Some images of the way cities should be built (and can be, as these are from
real Dutch cities):
[http://www.aankoopmakelaargroningen.com/images/websites/56//...](http://www.aankoopmakelaargroningen.com/images/websites/56//024.JPG)
[http://cache.virtualtourist.com/789252-AMSTERDAM_ZUIDERKERK_...](http://cache.virtualtourist.com/789252-AMSTERDAM_ZUIDERKERK_GROENBURGWAL-
Amsterdam.jpg)
[http://home.kpn.nl/hemmoheidekamp/32/ooftstraat%20concordiab...](http://home.kpn.nl/hemmoheidekamp/32/ooftstraat%20concordiabuurt%20groningen.JPG)
[http://v6.cache4.c.bigcache.googleapis.com/static.panoramio....](http://v6.cache4.c.bigcache.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/22590551.jpg?redirect_counter=1)

Core ideas: \- More room for green, less room for driving, still some parking-
space (it is the fast driving, not the sitting cars that kill city life) \-
Very slow driving (15 miles an hour max) within residential blocks (a single
narrow lane + speed-bumps and obstacles/hedges can enforce this) \- No cars at
all in certain streets, playgrounds instead, keeps young families in the city
\- Finally, build more densely, so shops / public transportation becomes
economically viable. How hard can this be? (/me wonders what stops architects
from simply copying historic styles and neighbourhood-layouts)

~~~
rayiner
Now scale this idea to American metropolitan areas. 27 US metro areas are
bigger than the Amsterdam metro area, and about a dozen are at least twice as
big. Having been to Amsterdam, I can say that while it's denser then most
American cities, it's not that dramatically different then say DC.

~~~
jarek
London?

------
athst
We really need to stop calling everything a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a
very specific thing: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme>

Adding that label to everything you think is bad cheapens both the meaning and
the point you're trying to get across.

~~~
near_acorn
It isn't being applied to "everything [people] think is bad"; it is being
applied to situations where the form "bad" takes is a reliance on continuous
growth/investment/new-rubes to prevent collapse/disaster. It may cheapen the
technical use of the term, but it most certainly conveys "the point [people
are] trying to get across". Apparently, people find that of more general use
than preserving a term-of-art of limited audience.

~~~
bonzoesc
Why not use "unsustainable" instead of "Ponzi scheme?"

~~~
near_acorn
I think people are emphasizing the peculiar relationship between
investment/growth and staving off disaster. Oil is "unsustainable" it is not a
Ponzi scheme (in the popular sense) because if people doubled the amount of
oil they bought this year this would, in general, bring the endgame closer and
not further.

------
pnathan
I expected this article to be much more inflammatory and generally wharrgharbl
than it turned out to be.

But I hate suburbs, personally, so my opinion might be biased.

edit: a few more thoughts.

I live in a fairly 'typical' US smaller town ( _not_ a small town). Here, new
houses are jammed on their 1/2 acre with a minimal back yard, row after row
after row of them. They are made poorly and there are no trees lining the
streets. Streets curve round and round, making it difficult to travel from
place to place. New apartment buildings follow a similar fashion, but are very
small: suitable for student roommates in size, not suitable for more than two-
three single people living together (or a married couple).

Contrast this with the older downtown, where houses are somewhat original,
trees are planted (leading to shady sidewalks), and the streets are straight,
leading to easy travel.

I was thinking about this on a recent trip to Seattle's downtown. There, not
only are there trees and original buildings, but the businesses as housing are
intermingled, plus they go up, allowing a much greater compaction of space. I
would believe there is quite a nice economy of infrastructure scale going on
there. Further, it is not like you have to travel between Zones to go shopping
or go out to eat: you wander on down half a block, and you're there. Both my
town's downtown and downtown Seattle present a much nicer experience than the
row housing suburban monotony.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a fairly dense neighborhood just east of
downtown. I can walk to no less than two supermarkets, one Trader Joe's, and
one food co-op. My job is a ten minute walk on foot. I am surrounded by
terrific restaurants and bars. I actually get irritated when I'm required to
get into my car to go somewhere now.

When I first moved to the Seattle area, I lived in Microsoft corporate housing
in Redmond, a smaller suburb about 12 miles east of Seattle. The area felt
depressing, isolated and uninhabited most weekends.

~~~
pnathan
I stayed in Madison Park? region, and wandered over to Capitol Hill a bit. I
liked the liveliness of the area! I really, really, _really_ like the jumbling
of businesses and homes.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Me too. I can no longer imagine living in an area where I have to drive
_anywhere_ five-or-more days a week.

~~~
jseliger
I used to live on Capitol Hill, on 12th across from Seattle U. Then I moved to
Tucson for grad school. The city is a giant suburb; you effectively can't walk
anywhere. I miss Seattle.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
A friend of mine from Seattle moved to Phoenix for grad school last year and
says the same thing. Very unfortunate.

Surprisingly, another friend of mine who moved to Los Angeles for grad school
a year now lives in a neighborhood of LA that she compares quite favorably to
the Hill in terms of walkability. That, I would've never expected to hear.

------
jseliger
By this definition, any real estate is a "giant Ponzi scheme," since it
depends on people after you buying the asset.

Cities are great, but suburbs have their place (in large part because of a)
building codes that prevent tall buildings and b) how schools are funded),
which the author gets to some extent. If you're interested in the issue, try
Edward Glaeser's book _The Triumph of the City_ :
[http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-
Health...](http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-
Healthier/dp/159420277X?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957)
.

~~~
jfruh
Bulding codes that prevent tall buildings are an asset particulary if you make
money from selling petroleum, as they make it difficult to build walkable
neighborhoods.

~~~
wallflower
As someone who lived in a suburb and tried going without a car for a (short)
while, it is near impossible to get around.

Biking on busy 35mph four lane streets where bored suburbanites go 50mph with
no median is a prescription for death by invisibility. I had to double my
short-lived bike commute to take advantage of back roads (which was even
scarier because bored high schoolers barreling down the hill don't expect
you).

Taking the bus to a destination (if it is even possible) can be a maddening
version of real-life Candy Land in which you loop around and around and
double-back and eventually reach point B.

Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis style layout of suburban enclaves make public
transportation a virtual no-go as the shortest-path distance from point A to
point B is impossible as it would require jumping fences or at the least,
going through people's sacrosant backyards.

Bottom line, in the suburbs you need a car to live - to go grocery shopping,
to go to Applebee's to meet your friends and carry that annoying table buzzer
around like an embarassing vibrator while you wait for your table, to go to
the Multiplex, to go park in the deadly silent except for lawn mowers parking
lot of your rental apartment megaplex, and (most importantly) to go to the
closest major city to escape the burbs for real nightlife.

But, witness the explosion in mega corporate office parks, and realize that
the growth was because not everyone wants to live in a city - especially once
you have kids. Companies built office parks because that is where their
employees wanted to live. Or was it a chicken-before-the-egg issue?

~~~
pnathan
Yeah, what is _up_ with that "Cul-de-sacs and the Fleur-de-lis" layout going
on? It's maddening!

~~~
techsupporter
It's because the market (that is, home buyers) don't want to live on streets
that can be used as cut-throughs to get to other places. As traffic density
increases, drivers will try to find shorter or less-congested routes to get
where they want to go. The street on which I live (in an area built
approximately 30 years ago) is an example of this: it is a wide two-lane
street that connects two major roadways. There are other, non-residential
streets that connect these same roadways but those routes are clogged most of
the time. Therefore, people use my street with all of its attendant problems
such as speeding, extremely loud exhaust and/or sound systems, not watching
for people walking or biking, etc. So, non-connecting streets became the
popular thing to do, along with curving streets to force drivers to slow down.

~~~
tptacek
This design, by the way, isn't just some evil plot by the Robert Moses's and
Henry Fords of the world; it's an idiom endorsed by Christopher Alexander in
_A Pattern Language_.

~~~
qjz
I live on the "stalk" of such a development and therefore my street is the
busiest. Nonetheless, it is extremely pleasant, as only residents or service
people use it. It isn't a shortcut to anywhere. The biggest shortcoming is
that no consideration was made for pedestrians. Even though we live close
enough that my kids could walk to school, there aren't any trails or sidewalks
that offer the opportunity. By road, we're a few miles away, so my kids take
the bus. It's kind of sad.

~~~
rdtsc
That is exactly what they solved in my community. There are cul-de-sacs but
they have also built bike-able and walkable paths between the back yards so
you can still cut through if you wanted on foot or bike but cars can't pass
through.

~~~
r00fus
They do this frequently in french suburbs (at least the ones I've visited near
Tours)

------
xxpor
There is no better place to see this than Cleveland. Especially because it's
all starting to bite them in the behind. People in the suburbs depend on the
main city to be the heart of the region. But, almost everyone with a family
who possibly could has moved out to the suburbs, even ones that are only
marginally better (Warrensville Heights, North Randell). This has caused a
HUGE loss of tax base, even larger than the numbers would suggest (Cleveland
has 50% of the population it did in 1960), because the populace is
significantly poorer.

Now, there are water mains breaking all the time, gas lines that are leaking,
the roads that are down to the brick under layer that they were built on,
many, many abandoned buildings that are a concentrator of crime and cost. For
example, a former clothing factory on E 55th caught fire this past week. It's
been abandoned since 1992, so the city hasn't gotten any tax from it since
then. Crime is really bad, especially on the east side.

People in the suburbs resent giving the city any money, because everyone in
the city to them is stupid and lazy, and their taxes are really high already.
And now the people are starting to move even farther out to Medina, Geauga and
Lorain counties, and complain the taxes are even higher. It's ridiculous.
Unfortunately, I really don't see this changing anytime soon, due to the way
schools are funded though local property taxes.

~~~
knowtheory
Why would Cleveland be the best place to see this?

Wouldn't Detroit be better? Detroit has already collapsed, and is well into a
long contractionary period. Local government (sans Kwame) have basically said
"well we gotta get used to a smaller tax base and scale back".

Oh, and i absolutely agree on Ohio's school system being totally batshit
(Michigan's too). The fact that state funding for the Ohio public schools was
declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, and then the state
government just simply did nothing is a fucking outrage. To this day, nothing
has been done to fix the fundamental injustices of Ohio's schools (rich
suburbs can afford rich public schools, and poor towns get nothing. Not even
intact school buildings).

~~~
xxpor
You're right Detroit might be better. I'm just more familiar with Cleveland,
and was using it more as a figure of speech.

And too be fair, Cleveland is collapsing almost as fast as Detroit, save for
Downtown, Tremont, and the Gordon Sq. area.

Edit: And possibly UC, but that's still debatable. It's certainly not falling
as fast as the surrounding neighborhoods, that's for sure. But there are also
5+ police departments patrolling to try and keep the riff raff out.

~~~
knowtheory
Yeah, i don't mean to detract from your point. Cleveland has problems, and it
needs to find a way to jump start some development.

------
cantbecool
Why didn't you link to the original source?
[http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-
suburbs-...](http://www.grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are-
a-giant-ponzi-scheme)

~~~
hammerdr
Because the attribution in the article wasn't nearly visible enough. Sorry
about that!

~~~
cantbecool
Good point, the contrast between link and text was subtle at best.

------
api
Ponzi scheme is wrong-- a Ponzi scheme is a specific thing.

But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of
Mr. Fusion or similar. When cheap oil is gone, the suburbs are gone.

Oh there are replacements, but none of the replacements can deliver at scale
at a cost cheap enough to keep the suburbs going. The suburbs don't just
require oil... they require very very _cheap_ oil. Otherwise they are simply
not economical.

Electric cars are feasible, but they're going to need a _lot_ of extra grid
capacity. Keep in mind that after oil peaks gas and coal will peak too, and
keeping the grid up and growing capacity in the post-fossil-fuel age is going
to be a major undertaking requiring the full development of pretty much every
post-fossil-fuel energy source: gen-IV nuclear, wind, solar, etc.

All that adds up to cost... which brings us back around to the original point:
it's not going to be cheap. Thus, the suburbs won't be economical. It will be
cheaper to just abandon the suburbs and save the energy than to support them.

The suburbs will be the slums of the future. You can already see this
happening.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
"But it is true that the suburbs are unsustainable, barring the invention of
Mr. Fusion or similar."

Nuclear should be pretty cheap once we are forced to stop building reactors as
unique works of art, and stop powering them with one-time-use fuel elements.

------
raganwald
The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another
perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446320/>

And in free as in beer, glorious 240p:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug>

It's entertaining and, IMO, well worth watching even if you disagree with some
of the people they interview or prefer your documentaries balanced and
dispassionate. You're sure to come away from the movie feeling you know more
about the history of the relationship between the automobile and the suburbs.

~~~
jseliger
"The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another
perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil:"

I dislike the suburbs as much as the next wannabe new urbanist type, but a)
given development patterns of the last 70 years, it's hard to see anything
happening to suburbs save on the same timescale and b) hybrid and/or electric
cars will replace gas-powered ones if the price of oil rises high enough.
Sure, the (current) higher stick price of hybrid / electric cars means that
cities will become more attractive at the margin, but given how easy the
substitutes are, I think electric cars (and the infrastructure necessary to
run them) are now advanced enough to ensure that oil prices alone won't damn
suburbs.

~~~
raganwald
There's actually a section in the movie on the subject of electricity:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug&t=16m15s)

And later on they discuss hybrids and electric cars specifically. But to be
clear, I don't recommend the movie because it's _right_ , but because it asks
interesting questions and leads you to think about interesting possibilities.

We use a lot of energy. If we're going to replace the energy from fossil fuels
with energy from electricity, we are going to need a lot more capacity than we
have today. And as you can see from recent news, doubling or trebling our
capacity is no small feat.

------
daemin
There was an awesome talk by an architect Jan Gehl that I managed to catch
([http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796...](http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/06/21/3248796.htm))
talking about how new development projects have been built to look good from
the Plane and Helicopter perspectives (from 5000feet/metres and
rooftop/helicopter) while completely ignoring the street level at which most
people operate on.

While the talk was more about large building projects, in the second half he
does talk about how Copenhagen has transformed itself into a more bike and
people friendly environment. More specifically he details how people's
behaviour has changed in response to the different environmen, where walking
and riding has been made more accessible and safer (for instance bike lanes on
the inside of parked cars, so the cars protect the bike lane from the street),
more people end up walking and riding.

Now suburbia has pretty much been designed for cars rather than people, and as
such it is no real wonder that you have to drive everywhere rather than
cycling or walking.

It should be possible to change this suburbia to something less car friendly,
perhaps in cities like Detroit and others, which are in the process of
removing suburbs entirely (or so I have read), so that people's behaviour
changes. However I don't see this happening easily in the USA. People will
relinquish their suburbs, cars, SUV's only when pried from their cold dead
hands.

------
gnubardt
_The Power Broker_ by Robert Caro is a fantastic biography of Robert Moses,
the person who set the template for this kind of development. Though in power
in New York, the projects he built (highways, parks, bridges, public housing)
was at a scale never seem before him. He figured out how to cut through
municipal red tape to build at a large scale using public money.

Not that he wasn't a terrible person. But he wrote the rules that allowed a
lot of this kind of development to happen.

------
yason
It's not really a problem as far as suburbs go: those who want can certainly
live there as long as they consider them fit. If suburbia is a bubble, it'll
come down crashing eventually.

If there's something to change with regard to the suburbs is that we should
distribute the costs of living in a suburbs vs cities fairly. That is
suburbanites should be paying much larger portion of the costs of public
infrastructure and roads that stretch dozens of miles out to the countryside
and are of no use except for suburbanites themselves.

However, there's a much more serious problem related to the effects of
suburbia.

The fundamentals of current city planning and urban design, largely borrowed
from the Garden City utopia, for the suburbia are so detached from the reality
of urban development in cities that the greatest danger is in blindly applying
these incompatible principles to the urban environment and, in effect of doing
so, crippling the _real fundamentals_ that actually govern a vibrant city
life. We are killing the whatever health our cities might still possess by
making them more fit for automobiles, segregating different uses into
different zones, and doing huge disruptive redevelopment projects that wipe
out and reset to zero big parts of city neighbourhoods.

The result from this is be the devastation of cities by applying governance
and design principles incompatible with city development--which has already
been going on for decades--which effectively leaves people only the suburbia.

Such a monotonous development is bad for the survival in general as is
anything that lacks diversity. Think of Windows viruses versus virii for other
platforms. Such a big disruption that could wipe out suburbia for anybody but
the richest of the people is the rising of the price of oil. The oil price has
already reached levels where daily automobile commuting from the farthest
backwaters of suburbia becomes an actual economic obstacle. If, or when,
suburbia fails, I'd like that we would still have cities where to retreat.

------
awakeasleep
Hacker News Memes:

_________ Considered Harmful

_________ Is a Ponzi Scheme

I don't know why those phrases resonate here, but throw in some nouns and half
an hour writing, and you can say hi to the front page.

~~~
zacharypinter
Don't forget this one :)

_________ Bitcoin _________

------
cageface
I'm beginning to think that the term "Ponzi scheme" is a semantic Ponzi
scheme.

------
pash
The author's vague assertions that suburban development in America represents
an enormous unfunded liability are supported in part by a considerable body of
recent research suggesting that suburban lifestyles are far less efficient
than their urban analogues.

To get you started, Geoffrey West, one of those physicists at the Santa Fe
Institute who stick their noses into everything but physics, does a schtick
introducing the idea of power-law scaling in urban agglomerations that you can
find in various versions on YouTube [1].

An easy-reading overview of the same idea is Luis Bettencourt's paper with
West, recently published in _Nature_ , which points out that "doubling the
population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure,
whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes
or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in
general, _creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities
is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality
services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places._ " The already
classic reference is their 2007 paper in PNAS [3].

But the power-law approach ignores the true city-suburb distinction by
focusing solely on size. (Suburbs are not small cities.) Edward Glaeser, a top
urban economist, and Matthew Kahn recently did a panel study of geographic
greenhouse gas emissions that includes a direct comparison of cities to their
suburbs [4]. They found that suburban household emissions are higher than
those of city households, usually substantially, in 48 of the 50 largest
American metros. (See Table 5 for the money-stats.) The methodology reveals a
wide urban-suburban disparity in energy-efficiency that I imagine is mirrored
in the efficiency of use of many other resources.

(Next up, someone needs to integrate these approaches by comparing urban and
suburban power-law residuals [5].)

None of this bears directly on the author's point in the linked article, but
it does suggests that suburban development is a poor investment if an urban
option exists.

1\. A recent (and short) version: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m-jM_Z9LtA>

2\.
[http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%2020...](http://www.cabdyn.ox.ac.uk/complexity_PDFs/Publications%202010/Nature_Cities.pdf)
[PDF]

3\. <http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.full.pdf+html> [embedded PDF]

4\.
[http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/fi...](http://www.hks.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/pdfs/centers-
programs/centers/taubman/working_papers/glaeser_08_greencities.pdf) [PDF]

5\. The residual approach is presented in another recent paper by Bettencourt,
West, and crew:
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013541)

~~~
mathgladiator
I recently made the choice to go from the suburb to urban environment, and
while I have to say that personally, it has been way better.

While I do pay more for rent, I do have a more enjoyable day. No commute.
Walking distance everywhere of importance. Cool back-drop.

So, the ultimate question then, given what we have, how do we scale this up?

~~~
baguasquirrel
I'll tell you what doesn't work. Overbuilding the place. Staten Island is a
tragic example of this. In Manhattan, it's like they're repaving the streets
with park.

You need a certain amount of density. But the overriding purpose of the
density is to be able to cram more stuff-you-want-to-do near your house.

Also, keep in mind that the "stuff" in stuff-you-want-to-do can be replaced
with "people".

~~~
regularfry
Yup. This has been borne out in studies of high-rise buildings as well - they
just don't work to efficiently house large numbers of people, it ends up
cheaper overall to put people in traditionally-sized houses.

------
skybrian
There must be a corrolary to Godwin's law that says any financial system will
eventually be compared to a giant Ponzi scheme. New metaphor, please!

------
StephenFalken
I guess some people have found more sustainable healthier ways of living
inside a city:

"Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" ->
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M>

~~~
usaar333
Flat land helps; see Davis, CA.

Now try that in wide swaths of San Francisco:
[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22nd+st+and+rhode+island+&hl=en&ll=37.75426,-122.401578&spn=0.009857,0.01929&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=40.052282,79.013672&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.753334,-122.401107&panoid=mCWNoN_KpD5p3WE9NygDDQ&cbp=12,339.65,,0,0.5)

------
aj700
I already knew this. This is why Europe will continue to do well whatever the
oil price. Most cities are still built around public transport. The UK and
some others are not.

When nobody can afford to commute from their homes to their work, and there is
no alternative, Roger Rabbit will seem bitterly unfunny.

~~~
arethuza
There are certainly cities in the UK that still depend on public transport far
more than cars - I live in one: Edinburgh. I work in an office right in the
center of Edinburgh and of the thirty odd people here _nobody_ drives to the
office - most take the train, some take the bus and a few (including me) walk.

~~~
justincormack
And London too, which manages half the bus trips in the UK, among other
things.

------
alanh
Off-topic, but what is up with the font size changing seemingly at random?

~~~
swaits
Bugged me too. I quickly gave up trying to read it.

------
mkelly
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I'd be much more interested to read
some research on this topic than a bunch of unsourced opinion.

To make a claim like this you need some hard numbers, in my opinion.

------
joshuaheard
Governments don't have money for infrastructure any more because, since the
'60s, they have been spending this money on social programs.

------
synnik
But suburbs are also taking themselves back. Many suburbs have been working to
bring the jobs (and taxes) back into themselves. They also have their own
utilities and water supplies, and clearly the shopping is there. The biggest
gap is food, and cities aren't going to fare any better than suburbs if our
transportation industry gets disrupted.

------
0xB33F
Can I get a raise of hands from those people who have a mortgage and actually
support this?

------
grandalf
In a sense, America is a giant Ponzi scheme. We're in the middle of a long,
slow currency bubble and drenched in the spoils of centuries of imperial
expansion... at present, the average American adult works less than four hours
per day and has inferior work ethic and basic education than an increasing
percentage of the citizens of the third world, most of whom are ruled by
corrupt despots installed by the US.

~~~
william42
Where'd you get this «less than four hours per day» thing?

~~~
grandalf
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-
less...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/americans-work-less-than-
four-hours_n_884037.html)

~~~
m3koval
That's four hours per day averaged over the entire study. These statistics are
more telling:

"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More
hours were worked, on average, on weekdays than on weekend days--7.9 hours
compared with 5.5 hours."

This about matches what you would expect for full-time employees. I'm not sure
how this can be construed as laziness. In fact, there are several studies that
show the exact opposite: Americans working more hours than most other first-
world countries. I do not have links handy, but I believe one was posted on HN
a few months ago.

Source: <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm>

