I can't find it anymore but I read a long form article like this probably 10 years ago on the problem of suburbs public infrastructure.
Basically they ran the numbers and figured out that more than 50% of cities simply cannot afford to maintain the suburb infrastructure no matter what they do with the budget. Even if they did something crazy like tripled taxes tomorrow they still could not afford it. The called them zombie cities or something like that.
The current implementation of market economy i.e. capitalism is growth dependent. It is entirely plausible that cities follow the same growth dependence strategy the rest of the economy follows.
- Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns.
- The ASCE number is a bit of a joke - this is a marketing number for the purposes of pushing investment in engineering firms. In reality, your city doesn't need to pay to rebuild every suburban road it has when filling potholes is cheap.
- Furthermore, this article does nothing to actually link these liabilities to where the revenues occur. The giant cost of replacing an aging power plant completely dwarfs the cost of suburban power lines. But a new subdivision is a huge tax boon to a community.
> - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns.
At least in my travels, the suburbs I've seen outside the US have only borne a very surface-level similarity to their US counterparts. There are lawns and the houses are detached, but the suburbs themselves tend to be much denser and connected to city centers via rail. These combine to make European suburbs more sustainable than their American counterparts.
(There are other factors as well: most of Continental Europe has much more consistent rainfall than the Continental US, and there's no particular evidence that their suburban constructions are ultimately sustainable either -- they may just be more than our ludicrously unsustainable ones.)
There are suburbs in, not outside my city and they look nothing like American suburbs. The mixed zoning alone makes up a huge difference. The plot sizes are much smaller and the density is higher.
All of this is true, but you’ve missed the biggest issue with the above argument, which is implying that we cannot afford to replace what our much poorer ancestors afforded to build.
Those poorer ancestors built denser housing and commercial real estate. What they built back in the day is often illegal today and has been grandfathered in while outperforming modern real estate in property taxes. Old "blighted" buildings can pay more taxes than fancy new commercial real estate that is designed for car dependency and suburbia.
No, I mean the suburbia. The entire shtick of Strongtowns is that suburbia is unsustainable, because it requires infrastructure that we cannot now afford to replace, despite being able to afford to build it in the first place.
The Growth Ponzi Scheme is the thing that explains this.
The cost of building out infrastructure the first time is covered by the sale of the newly constructed properties (and sometimes state or federal grant money) which is all one-time income.
Taxes are supposed to cover the eventual replacement cost, but they can’t because the level of taxation required to actually do this would make suburbs unaffordable. Instead, they primarily use debt and tax revenue from newer properties that are supposed to be paying for their own eventual infrastructure replacement to make up the deficit.
This is why Strong Towns calls it the growth ponzi scheme: the city can only outrun the cost of infrastructure replacement by taking money from new properties to pay for old ones until they run out of land to build or assets to leverage for debt, at which point the whole scheme fails.
I too want to find this article (I'm certain it was linked from HN). It isn't a strong towns article, but it had some great diagrams showing how the city centers are the only economically viable places for utilities because of density. The suburbs were just not cost effective and thus were going to go bankrupt because of the lack of efficiency. I've tried to find this article in the past and it has been long enough that I'm not really sure what to google for at this point.
> What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
> This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
I have strong suspicions that the data doesn't hold up if examined closely, because "suburbs" are just low density towns, and small towns continue to exist nearly everywhere.
Sure maintenance comes around, but it always seems to work out, somehow.
There are lots of small towns across the US where it has not worked out.
I spent a couple years in Macomb, IL when I was a kid. Take a look at that place on Street View.
Overall population growth is mostly what has allowed for things to “work out” previously, but as the rate of growth slows down or even goes negative for the first time in recent history, the necessary conditions may not hold anymore for things to “work out”.
No, (North American) suburbs are fundamentally different to small towns. They don't have their own retail or small businesses, they're just places where people live and commute into the city.
Well a counterpoint would be the northern suburbs of Dallas like Plano, Richardson, and Frisco. They have so much economic activity that I would not be surprised if more people commuted from Dallas to those suburbs for work than vice versa. Also, I bet the people living in the far north exurbs are commuting to the suburbs and not all the way to Dallas proper.
They're not small towns. Suburban homes very often have no commercial activity in close proximity. You have to drive somewhere else to do just about anything.
Small towns haven't historically been built like that.
I have read something similar somewhere in the sphere of StrongTowns, I believe. Basically the story goes that infrastructure was paid for by expansion, which required more infrastructure; and so the pyramid scheme was made. The people got these godawful strip malls, "stroads", and suburban sprawl. The towns kicked the problem down the road but once the expansion has to stop, the whole thing comes apart.
It is similar to avoiding the problem of pensions by keeping the population young through population growth. As more people are being born, the population may even get younger if the growth rate is fast enough. It looks like the pension problem has been solved but once population growth stops there is nothing you can do.
Basically they ran the numbers and figured out that more than 50% of cities simply cannot afford to maintain the suburb infrastructure no matter what they do with the budget. Even if they did something crazy like tripled taxes tomorrow they still could not afford it. The called them zombie cities or something like that.