To my sensibility, energy-wise, prices are cheap in exactly the wrong places where you want concentrated populations. People are rather expensive (in energy terms) to logistically serve and they are even more expensive to move around, so you want them near waterways and coasts, and more sparse in inland areas, making the inland areas serve functions that require lots of land, like food production and renewable energy production.
We should be forcing low-density development residents and business to pay their own way on infrastructure build-outs around coastal and near-waterway metropolitan areas, and increasing population densities of the urban cores to around 25-30K per square mile on average, but the way the real estate business is structurally organized in the US and so tightly interwoven into our financial structures, there are very few ways I foresee how to accomplish that without excruciatingly high residential pricing, and all those ways are very uphill wars on powerful, entrenched economic interests.
If I read you correctly you're essentially suggesting that someone living in a low-cost of living area isn't paying enough for the shipped products they receive by way of major transport hubs?
I'd argue that's slightly evened out by prices that don't fluctuate as much by location. ex: In my midwest city I own a 3br 1500 sqft house that cost 190k and my wife and I gross over 160k. In an SV or Seattle type area we could be double the income and 10x or more for same house so it seems like we're getting a sweet deal right? But plane tickets, automobiles, many smaller consumables, anything you can buy on amazon, higher priced hobby items (phones, road bike, etc), are relatively inelastic to location. So we pay a larger share of our income than if we lived in a high-income area. To a certain extent, fuel as well. I regularly travel to chicago, seattle, and intermittently to LA area and gas prices are only marginally higher than in my low tax red state. While not so static, the cost is a bit baked in there as it's a larger proportion of my income to fuel my car.
That said, I'd have to put real numbers into this to see if my counter argument holds. You may be right that we underpay at a macro level and have some arbitrage. Your message just seemed to suggest it was obvious which I don't think is the case.
> ...you're essentially suggesting that someone living in a low-cost of living area isn't paying enough for the shipped products they receive by way of major transport hubs?
Sorry, I'm not writing clearly enough. Inland areas should have fewer and smaller population centers, and what do exist, should be dense, if we were eyeing our position on the Kardashev and concerned about where our next big energy sources are coming from.
You have to consider it relative to the area's income level. I could rent 2 or 3 detached 3+ BR houses in my home town for what I pay for a 2BR in the East Bay. But, I'd never be able to make the kind of money I make here back in my hometown. If I'm lucky, I could make about 40% what I do now, with a 40 minute driving commute (because there's no public transportation, and the jobs actually in my hometown are not going to pay me anything).
Prices are generally cheap to average, but taxes are high and the urban areas are on track to complete fiscal meltdown due to the some of the parameters around public safety contract negotiations and other factors.
In my case, my property taxes are about 3.5% of home value.
Also, the environment for commercial development is pretty bleak. If you have a job, it's an awesome place to live and work. But it's hard to get one, and mobility between employers is limited.
It's still an order of magnitude cheaper to live here than SFO and significantly less than the NY Metro or Boston Metro areas.
IMO NYC should be a different state than the rest of NY. Trying to make state laws which work for both seems like an exercise in balancing conflicting needs. Geographically, NYC is in the corner, so it'd be relatively easy to draw one line to sever it.
If I were to reorganize the US, I'd make every CSA and primary MSA a state-equivalent with its own legislative, judicial, and executive branches not subject to the jurisdiction of any state and just leave the states to governing non-urbanized territory and primary µSAs. I think the 35 counties of the New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of their states, and they should be able to govern themselves as a unit independent of their states.
I've been thinking about this for a while, thanks to the Texas State Legislature making several attempts to override local government and give the finger to local control this year. State legislatures are often heavily gerrymandered, with undue weight given to the rural parts of the state. As such, it's not uncommon for rural-dominated state legislatures to attempt to force their social agendas on the cities, even though the vast majority of the state's population is in the cities. See also North Carolina's HB2. For a while I was thinking that any city over 100k people should be independent of any state, but on further reflection I think just making the CSAs independent of states instead of drilling down to the individual city level would be a better way to go.
ehhhhh seems pretty damn cheap