
America’s Cities Are Running Out of Room - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-22/america-s-cities-are-running-out-of-room?cmpid=BBD052217_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170522&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily
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wahern

      > The wealthiest residents are the only ones who can buy,
      > and a vicious cycle is created.
    

It's the exact same vicious cycle as with sprawl. The difference is that
sprawl is unmaintainable, whereas there's an equilibrium to be found with
centralization and the lifecycle of urban neighborhoods. Maintaining all the
infrastructure of sprawl will increasingly consume the entire municipal budget
of cities, as it does for so many today.

Anybody living in the suburbs: look outside your window and calculate how much
it would cost to repave your street and replace your water and sewage. Now
look at your property taxes. For the vast majority of you the numbers will
blow your mind, and that's before you even consider public schools and other
expenses. I can tell you exactly what will happen when it comes time to pay
the piper: well-off people will move to some place new, the poor will move
into [some of] the vacated neighborhoods, and the infrastructure will continue
to rot.

Suburban neighborhoods won't gentrify because it's not cost effective to renew
the infrastructure. A suburban neighborhood is nothing but a liability from
day 1.

50 years from now the long-gone blight of inner-city rust belts created by
post-WWII migration to the suburbs will pale in comparison to what various
suburbs are increasingly becoming. The extent of blight will be measured in
square miles instead of square blocks. It will be epic. Heck, take a road trip
across the U.S.--it's _already_ epic.

