I am biased because I quite like living in the suburbs, and get quite suspicious when some manifesto comes up that dictates I should feel bad for it. Why is the solution to live in better designed cities instead of better designed suburbs? Are cities still necessary given the modern conditions?
You shouldn't feel bad but it's more of a matter that your lifestyle is likely heavily subsidized because your town doesn't have the tax base (nor will they raise your taxes) to support the infrastructure that's required to make suburbs function.
If you were paying the true costs of living in the suburbs this wouldn't be an issue, but there's a high likelihood you don't.
Cities will always be necessary because they are one of the most efficient ways (cheaper to build, maintain, and support) to account/house large amounts of people. If you want to live in other types of areas you should, ideally, be willing to pay the true costs.
I can't link the article since I'm on a subway but Strong Towns is a good resource explaining how suburbs bankrupt themselves in the future since they won't be able to pay for the costly maintenance of their infrastructure (water, electric, roads, etc):
Why should every small sub-section of geographies "pay-out" for themselves. The whole point of higher level organizing constructs (company, conglomerate, state, country) is we take systemically better decisions - which at a nation level will involve keeping people with different preferences united under the nation's big idea by supporting the diversity of preferences.
If to take an example Google insisted every development be independently paying out immediately, there wouldn't be any Maps, Docs, Drive...
If there was a similar insistance by Xerox, probably no personal computing.
Amd even at a state level, even in the US, there are states that pay more to the nation and there are states that get more. In the rest of the world - particularly in Asia, we just consider this support costs for maintaining nationhood.
Imagine if Xerox allocated its budget to 90% PARC, and 10% everything else - without adjusting any staffing. There'd be some really cool, really fun stuff going on, and the people at PARC would love it. But without people making and selling copiers, the whole company would be out of business before long.
The difference with suburbs/cities is the awareness, the expectation, and societal cost.
People living in the suburbs are generally unaware that they're being subsidized by the cities they live adjacent to, and have the expectation that their infrastructure and services be prioritized - generally to the detriment of the entire geographic region.
Going beyond that, the car-centric suburbia mindset has become the legal defacto design pattern, increasing costs and reducing livability for everyone.
So it's less that they should "pay-out" for themselves, and more that they should stop forcing their lifestyle choices on the rest of the population, and understand the costs associated with their lifestyle.
If state and federal governments didn't subsidize suburban infrastructure, cities would directly. The broader infrastructure network is vitally important for urban areas, and the suburbs especially are essential to retain the workers needed for productivity. Framing this as cities being exploited by greedy suburbanites is just wrong.
Cities would certainly naturally expand in a suburb-ish type of way. The issue with the current American style of suburbia is how expensive it is, and the extreme subsidies (both monetary and political pressure/force) what were implemented to set up the system in the first place.
Without that, America would have much denser "European style" urban hubs, and likely more active small cities than currently exist.
Subsidized in a way that they get a disproportionate amount of services perhaps. But I would argue that is almost irrelevant. Costly services like schooling and transport infrastructure scales mostly by the amount of people.
You could of course calculate business taxes proportionally to the work suburbs deliver, but that would be quite dishonest.
You can always say that only the most densely populated place carries its own... but that isn't convincing. I am not from the US, but we have similar discussions here. That people have to live in the city if they want to live efficient. Problem is that few want to and I think at that point the discussion should be almost ended.
Maybe they shouldn't pay out for themselves, but we should at least be aware of the costs so we can collectively plan and prioritize accordingly.
The same groups/organizations you named will often end activities or sub-groups that have a cost above a certain threshold.
I believe the overall intent here is to show the true cost of suburbs and evaluate if it's a pattern that cities can keep supporting. Ie, is the desire to live in the conditions suburbs create worth the cost of those arrangements?
The problem with that analogy is, suburbs doesn't benefit anyone besides the people living in them. So, by that logic, they should sustain themselves. Maps, Docs, and etc provide value to people outside themselves.
This is incorrect on a political and economic level. Fwiw I live in lower Manhattan, so I’m not saying this because I benefit from suburban subsidies. But if the country as whole subsidizes roads and services for a suburb of net positive income tax payers with otherwise low usage of welfare services, there is an economic logic to that. And obviously it gets votes.
As much as I like living in a dense area and riding my bike, the rise of the YouTube educated urban planner has led to a lot conclusions that aren’t particularly sound. Doing a flaw P&L on a small town and deciding, in so many words, that it shouldn’t exist is peak smugness.
I'm not an urban planner expert, but the logic makes sense to me. I look up my downtown condo vs a suburb home of comparable value, and I pay twice as much in property taxes. It's not hard to understand how density is inherently more efficient.
Depends on your perspective. Yes, it's less efficient for me (individually) because I'm subsidizing suburbs and paying more taxes.
But, I was talking about the city, society, or the greater good. Whatever you call it. Higher density is more efficient and uses less resources per capita. Period. Same reason private planes are so bad for the environment.
That might be true that higher density is more efficient, but efficiency isn't a sufficient metric for living overall. Putting everyone in camps would be more efficient too.
But do you really pay for suburbs? As I said, the cost intensive positions scale with the number of people. Schools, utilities, ...
Cost is a separate topic, though an important one.
But ultimately in these threads, the elephant in the room is that the suburbs are subsidized† by the cities they don't pay taxes into.
So why don't the cities expand their boundaries to include the suburbs, instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
† Side note: I have not found to be true, personally. Suburbs are paid for by the people who live there and the county, into whom we pay our taxes. In truth, a lot of our money goes into businesses in the city (who will in turn pay taxes to the city), since that's where we all go for our goods.
> […] instead of trying to kill the suburbs and pull the people back into the city (where they will generally be unhappy since they had chosen to live in suburbs in the first place)?
Perhaps they want to kill them because they are wasteful of area (often paving over perfectly good agricultural land), and cause climate change due to their reliance on cars.
Further, how much "choice" did suburban dwellers actually have? Post-WW2 most zoning has forced the creation of car-centric, low-density sprawl. Perhaps there are folks in the suburbs that want higher density neighbourhoods but because of the limited supply (due to lack of new build) the prices have gone up and they're priced out. Whose to say that walkable neighbourhoods wouldn't be popular if purchased in the "suburbs:
> † Side note: I have not found to be true, personally.
I think this depends on the municipal boundaries involved. Depending on where the border is, on one side it could be that things built in the "old" / pre-WW2 way and on the other the "new" / post-WW2 way, and the taxes go to each municipality appropriately. In other places there could be the pre-WW2 Old Downtown and is walkable, but everything new is non-walkable. In those latter situations the more walkable parts are probably subsidizing the less walkable ones:
I don't think his conclusions are great if you're working based off his examples. Like he brings up an example of a small neighborhood that, if it paid for its own road maintenance, would have to raise property taxes by 46% like that would be more than a mild inconvenience for the privilege of not living in a human hive.
If it paid for its own road maintenance, and no other services such as water or sewer, they would need a 46% property tax increase just to cover that one thing.
I'd be willing and able to pay quintuple my current property tax to keep the number of times I hear a car horn on my commute at one or two a week instead of one every ten seconds. Lots of other people are the same. An increase in cost of living in suburbs would be annoying but far from the "suburbs are a grotesque impossibility" stance of Charles Marohn.
I think an article you may be referring to is the in-depth Strong Towns series that analyzes Galesburg, Illinois. Galesburg is by no means a suburb, and in many ways it's more comparable to a big city since it dominates its county and has little suburbs of its own. I think the assessment was that Galesburg officials are making incredibly unfortunate and wasteful decisions, but the good news is that there are examples of better financial choices they can make going forward.
However, if another article on this subject comes to mind I'd appreciate to know what it is, once you're off the train of course.
I think it's difficult for someone to have much perspective on how much their own lifestyle is subsidized when the same can be said for the vast majority of people who enjoy benefits from the government, regardless of where they choose to live. Most people take more than they contribute, I don't think someone making $120,000 and paying $40,000 in taxes should feel any guilt for living in the suburbs when so many others can pay almost nothing in taxes and still enjoy huge amounts of government benefit.
The person making $120,000 is heavily benefiting from a public infrastructure that makes $120k/yr jobs possible. A ditch digger needs almost no infrastructure besides a shovel to do his job. An engineer needs schools and universities to educate his colleagues, roads and railways to deliver parts required for the product he's working on, and police services that deter theft of those products once they're built. Not to mention a consumer base with enough money to afford the product in question.
This is right. The suburbanite wants the benefits of agglomeration, but they want to define their existence within it so that they aren't exposed to any of its downsides. It’s a neat trick.
No one who pays "almost nothing in taxes" enjoys huge amounts of anything. Except maybe the actual rich with their tax avoidance games, but actual poverty fucking sucks and whatever meager benefits you manage to access don't change that.
The people we call rich pay the majority of taxes.
>In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes. [1]
You're right though, poverty does absolutely suck and realistically nobody's 'enjoying' EBT or assisted housing or whatever benefit they receive. The point I was trying to make is that poor people shouldn't feel badly for contributing less to the pie any more than 1%ers should feel righteous for contributing more.
The argument is that suburbs are incapable of affording the infrastructure required for their own existence. These costs are either subsidized or require persistent (perhaps unrealistic) growth to cover without dramatically increasing suburban taxes.
"Are cities necessary given the modern conditions?"
How many suburbs would exist without the corresponding city center? And, don't we just call suburbs without a city center, you know, towns?
There seems to be a naive belief that if everyone just lived in dense urban cores there would be no need to pay for infrastructure beyond the city limits.
Question really is the mechanism of pay. Maybe those costs on outside should be included in price of products and materials they buy. So for food the cost that goes to farmers and via them to local taxes should increase. As that would reflect what it really costs to produce for example food.
We’re talking suburbs. My city block contains literally thousands of homes and commercial properties in a zone that would contain, at most a few hundred McMansions. The cost to deliver services needed are within an order of magnitude of a suburb but the tax base is significantly higher.
Infrastructure outside the city is normally paid by a combination of County Taxes and State Taxes, and roads are also financed by the Federal Gas Tax, tolls and other forms of government income.
Of course we should pay for infrastructure outside the city, but if you expect to live outside city centers and have costly infrastructure such as a sewage system, high speed fiber internet and so on, you should pay accordingly.
What happens now is that this infrastructure is either financed by those living in city centers or by debt.
So I don't buy your Straw Man argument that people believe that dense urban cores are better. What was explicitly discussed is that people who live in the suburbs don't pay what they should.
My town pays for sewer (which I don't have) and water (which I do) out of property taxes, assessments, and a quarterly water bill. I pay Comcast for my own Internet and I pay for private trash. Property taxes also pay for education (a big chunk), snow plowing, police/fire/library, etc. There's some money to roads but, yes, that's mostly from the state and gas taxes which residents also pay of course. So it's not like cities are picking up the whole bill; while they have more people paying taxes, a lot of costs are much higher as well.
The residents of city centers need farms, so it is logical that they would subsidize some amount of rural infrastructure. Residents of cities require materials from elsewhere, so it is logical they would pay the cost of acquiring those resources.
What is the benefit to the city resident in subsiding the infrastructure of a suburb? Why shouldn't suburban residents pay the cost of their own infrastructure?
Which doesn't necessitate the presence of the suburban environment. If suburban residents want a lifestyle distinct from living in the city, that is absolutely fine - but they should pay the costs of that lifestyle as it is a choice (just as living in a single family home versus an apartment is a choice urban residents make and should pay the corresponding costs to support).
Asserting that the cost is necessary is a _big_ assumption. It's subsidized, sure, but that doesn't imply that it needs to be. If the subsidy ends, maybe wages will rise to close the gap, or maybe they won't, and suburban residents will move into denser accommodations nearer the city.
Or the suburban residents will move to a city that pays for them to live they way they want to live.
Cities are in competition for talent and labor. Those that provide more of what the people who provide that labor want will do better than those that do not.
Right, I am suggesting that a city can play out this competition by paying higher wages, i.e. paying suburban workers directly, rather than indirectly via subsidy. The experiment here is in wondering what those same workers would do given a net zero change to their income through a larger paycheck and higher housing costs. The subsidy doesn't allow efficient price discovery.
Presumably, the suburban residents work at businesses in the city. The city has attracted the businesses. It is the business that directly demands and compensates labor not the city.
Suburbs are towns (or small cities) in many parts of the US. I'm not sure it's even especially common in the US for cities to expand to engulf the whole surrounding area with a single central government. Although there are certainly examples such as Houston, I believe.
Annexation happened a lot in the U.S. but it didn't happen everywhere. Some places, like my hometown of St. Louis, are practically defined by the lack of annexation (although, even in that most famous case, St. Louis did annex several suburbs in the 19th Century, before its Great Divorce). Other places, like Chicago or NYC, pretty famously annexed practically everything around them. (Brooklyn was even once its own city.)
It's probably more common out West. In New England, while Boston did annex some neighboring communities, Cambridge and Somerville are still separate cities. And get just a little bit further out and you have a bunch of clumps of a few thousand people that are independent towns. I used to work with someone from Australia who could never get over all the 5,000 person towns with their own school system, various boards, etc.
But towns that manage their own utilities do exist. That suggests that suburbs are not fundamentally unsustainable, they just need to adjust their calculations and expectations.
Exactly. I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas.
I suspect there are bad suburbs somewhere, but here ain't it.
> I'm in a smallish town that owns its own power and water utility and maintains its own roads, and isn't "wealthy" or "exceptionally taxed" compared to other areas
Are you in a net contributor state as well? I live in a similar town, but it's in Wyoming, a state which benefits from federal transfers from urban centers.
Not sure, is there a list of "net contributor" states? And I suspect those look at federal budgets only, and ignore the other methods of "contributing".
Nobody is arguing we write off New Mexico, Mississippi or West Virginia. But their lifestyles are subsidized by Delaware (special case), Minnesota, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut and New York. (Scaling the net contribution to GDP removes much of the partisan slant introduced by urban centers having more people, and thus bigger numbers, as well as leaning blue.)
That's not really how funding works though. Say a company bids to build or refurbish a new street, the money paid to the company comes from a variety of pools, local, state, federal and utilities, to get funding from the different organizations the contract usually have multiple requirements like 'must build pipes for sewage, power, internet, ect' and the funding percentages of the project will depend on whats being built and where. That said, the people living in those houses will likely also pay state/federal taxes and utilities so its more complex. You also can't expect local towns or cities to foot the complete for big projects like highway overpasses and bridges and stuff, so how much a city contributes to infrastructure and gets back is harder to say.
I have yet to see anything that points to them being fundamentally worse than towns: if you just treat them as Towns Next To Cities, it seems like you solve the vast majority of the problems.
Because right now most don't and instead become cancerous growths on a city rather than their own financially independent communities. Where I live the suburbs aren't their own towns and that's where the problem is.
There's a reason suburbs are located directly adjacent to density and not islands of development in the middle of nowhere. Suburbs survive by proximity to density and, in most cases, pay no taxes to support that density. Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff.
It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement.
What suburbanites want is to be close enough to the city to enjoy all the benefits of being in a major metro area, without the hassle of supporting the project of urbanity. They want all the upsides without participating in addressing the (very real) downsides.
A suburb is in physical reality little more than just another neighborhood that has declared itself to be something else entirely in order to shirk its responsibility to the whole (sort of like if I declared my bedroom to be a separate apartment, so that I didn't have to acknowledge my roommate's chore list). Declaring yourself independent of your metro's core city doesn't magically make it so. It's just sticking your head in the sand.
> Suburbs survive by proximity to density and, in most cases, pay no taxes to support that density. […] What suburbanites want is to be close enough to the city to enjoy all the benefits of being in a major metro area, without the hassle of supporting the project of urbanity. They want all the upsides without participating in addressing the (very real) downsides.
You have this backwards: the higher density folks do not need support from the lower density folks. It is the opposite:
>Further, they use the state (via zoning laws) to prevent the natural development of more housing within their borders, guaranteeing a perpetual state of dependence, and ensuring that prices stay high enough to keep out the riffraff.
>It's a fundamentally parasitic arrangement.
Except that those "riff raff" aren't footing much if any of the tax bill for the high density city. That bill is paid by the wealthier people, many of whom are living in those suberbs, subsidizing the city costs. Who is parasitizing whom here?
This is like trying to define a garden to include only the tomatoes and none of the weeds. My commonsense opinion is that both the tomatoes and the weeds are part of the garden and if you setup a system where you say, "look, I only take care of the tomatoes, I'm not responsible for those awful weeds" then you're going to end up with a shitty garden.
Rich people and poor people alike live in cities. It is basically insane to separate them physically and declare them independent. You can't define away the problems of urbanization through economic segregation.
I mean, it would be one thing to enforce physical separation while still acknowledging that both halves are part of the same city (and the same tax base), but to go so far as to say, "no, we're actually not even part of the city, despite all commonsense physical reality; we're actually just a whole separate thing over here" is really an awe-inspiring level of audacity and chutzpah.
> but to go so far as to say, "no, we're actually not even part of the city, despite all commonsense physical reality; we're actually just a whole separate thing over here"
This was done pretty much the entire history of civilization. Communist revolutions tried to ignore the human nature that leads to it and we all know how that turned out.
My argument is for stronger private property rights, the elimination of state-enforced zoning, fewer regulations, and the right to build whatever kind of housing you want on property you own, which can be characterized as "communist" to the extent that words have no meaning.
Your position is that the state should use central planning to determine which kinds of economic activity are allowed on which parcels and then restrict property rights accordingly. The call is coming from inside the house.
There are plenty of suburbs* formed thanks to strong property rights where individuals came together and set up zoning rules of their own. Take this far enough and you end up way on the other side, with the state forbidding any zoning rules at all.
* Note that the way we are using this word is pretty vague and may be contributing extra crosstalk
> Note that the way we are using this word is pretty vague and may be contributing extra crosstalk
Yeah, it's an awful term, because it refers to hundred-year-old densely-populated urbanized areas that directly abut core cities whose borders were artificially locked into place in the 19th Century, and to greenfield interstate-offramp developments, and just about everything in between.
But, just to address your "way on the other side" scenario: forbidding zoning is exactly what the state should do. You don't get to have democracy for core rights. It doesn't matter if everybody in the neighborhood votes to restrict property rights. They're not up to a vote, just like you can't vote to restrict freedom of speech. It's not subject to a vote.
The right to build housing on my own private property is very clearly, in my view, protected by the U.S. Constitution and restricting that right is plainly a taking. I don't care what Euclid says. It was wrongly decided.
This point of view ignores the fact that suburbs are also necessary for employers to be able to have an ample worker pool without paying salaries that are high enough to afford city-only residents (a cost that would go even higher as more people moved into a city for work). Many people in suburbs who work in cities would not be able to afford living in that city, or, flat out refuse to because cities aren't always the best places for families.
Urbanization is a compromise (primarily of access vs. space/privacy). Suburbs, on the other hand, are a stubborn refusal to compromise. Everybody has to make tradeoffs about cost, space, time, etc, but suburbanites say, "no, no, no -- no tradeoffs for me. In this narrow zone we're just going to make it illegal to build the kind of housing that acknowledges the tradeoffs of urban life. In this zone it is illegal to make urban housing. In this zone tradeoffs are forbidden and you just have to be rich enough to ignore them to live here."
Of course there are tradeoffs, usually in the form of a longer commute.
> In this zone it is illegal to make urban housing.
So you'd propose forcefully building your preferred style of housing everywhere, even if the local residents don't want it?
Short of declaring a dictatorship, it won't succeed to force everyone to live in the same style of building. A very large part of the population has no interest in living in a high-rise apartment.
> So you'd propose forcefully building your preferred style of housing everywhere, even if the local residents don't want it?
Forcefully? When someone builds an apartment building on their own private property and voluntarily rents the units to other free actors, then obviously nobody was forced to do anything. The neighbors, on the other hand, would like to force the property owner to do something else with their land.
It's very important that we get this part clear in our minds. Zoning is coercion, not the other way around.
You'll sometimes see headlines about a "single-family home ban" whenever a city does zoning reform. No such thing exists. When we allow more uses on a city lot, we obviously have banned nothing.
And, I care about as much what the neighbors want me to do with my private property as I care what they think about my right to free expression. It's not subject to a vote. These rights are codified in our Constitution. They are not subject to a popularity contest. Some things are fundamental. We wrote those things down in a special document and put it in a folder titled, "things you don't get to vote on."
> Short of declaring a dictatorship, it won't succeed to force everyone to live in the same style of building. A very large part of the population has no interest in living in a high-rise apartment.
It's an enormous country and those people should feel free to hit the bricks (they can move, in other words). Or, hey, this is America. If you want to control what happens on a piece of private property, then buy it.
> It's an enormous country and those people should feel free to hit the bricks (they can move, in other words). Or, hey, this is America. If you want to control what happens on a piece of private property, then buy it.
Those two sentences are contradictory.
If someone owns a plot of land with a single family home, they do get to control it by staying put living in the house they like. They don't have to "hit the bricks" just because you'd prefer to tear it down to build a highrise.
> They don't have to "hit the bricks" just because you'd prefer to tear it down to build a highrise.
Do you think I'm talking about eminent domain, or something? I am not. I can't build a highrise on their property unless they let me. They're going to have to voluntarily sell me the land before I can do anything with it. I'm not proposing anything except that they be allowed to do that, if they wish to. They don't have to do anything.
There is a loophole there. I can buy up a lot of land, and sublet parcels to tenants under strict covenants. This is me doing what I want with my private property. Fast forward a century and you have a bunch of large communes owned by trusts dictating zoning. I.e. towns and cities.
> Many people in suburbs who work in cities would not be able to afford living in that city, or, flat out refuse to because cities aren't always the best places for families.
City/property is expensive because it is desirable. The US stopped building that kind of thing post-WW2, so the supply is finite and generally not growing anymore. Zoning is such that only car-centric, low-density developments are generally allowed.
There is nothing to prevent a policy change to allow "city" building like used to happen pre-WW2:
Because they benefit so enormously from the agglomeration effects of being adjacent to it. That density is the only reason they exist in the first place.
If my wife declared the kitchen to be a separate part of our apartment that she's not responsible for but then came into the kitchen every single day -- worked there, ate there, met friends there -- without ever participating in the maintenance of the kitchen, then I would think she's shirking her responsibility to the whole (and I'd be right).
"What's the problem? I have defined the area where I sleep to be independent of the kitchen! What part of that don't you get?" is not a compelling argument.
I live in what I suppose you could call a better-designed suburb (or small city; it's all semantics). My suburb of DC has a dense downtown with metro rail and bus access. It has plenty of walkability and apartments/condos for people who want that. It also has townhouses and single-family homes within walking distance of downtown. As you get further from the downtown, it becomes more and more traditionally suburban.
The core issue with this is cost. There are so few places like this in the U.S. that it's expensive to live here. Retrofitting a lot of suburbs with more of a core would help a lot.
The other big issue is what is called missing middle housing. There is a lot of apartments/condos and single-family housing. There aren't many townhouses or duplexes. This creates a situation where many people are either buying more house than they need or living in a space smaller than their needs/desires. This also causes single-family housing prices to be higher than they should be.
Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed).
And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.
> Ultimately, retrofitting the suburbs is the great challenge of the 21st century. We need more walkability and density in their cores. Basically, we need to bring back streetcar suburbs (which is what my town is, and after going through decades of losing density, it has been transformed).
> And then cities need to become better designed for more people, especially people with families and retirees.
Ultimately, it all boils down to work. Walkability is great, being able to bike is great, but if you don't have industry in your walkable suburb, it's just there and nice and everyone still has to drive or take a train to work in the city. As long as work centralizes in cities, we will have problems like this.
Yes, detached house suburbs are terrible for the environment: you take too much space, cars emit way too much CO2 per mile and you use them to go everywhere, even for small errands.
You can have well designed attached houses-or-appartment suburbs, and they exist, but in the US they’re $$$ for obvious reasons.
Anything car-centric is worse designed. That does not mean we have to ban cars 100%, but simply design things so the car is an option rather than a necessity.
Cities are more necessary than ever. Sustainable infrastructure is more necessary than ever. Unsustainable ways of living (ie. car-dependent suburbs) are one of the primary reasons it is so hard to effectively fight climate change.
Most far leftists would like us all to live in concrete towers, in small apartments, sharing a common bathroom area for maximum efficiency and density. Probably with mixed in sources of food and drink but not much in the way of consumerist "excess". It doesn't account for ideas of freedom or individuality or needing to see the sunlight. The problem with this is that it doesn't account for the rebellion that happens when you cause people to finally break from this unnatural condition and a million years of evolution.
The far leftists would, however, reserve for themselves a nice piece of suburbia as the rulers need good living conditions to properly plan people's lives.
It's because a lot of the problem has to do with how Car centric the US is and Suburbs in particular are extremely car dependent. It's not super clear you can change that without massively rebuilding them.
So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done.
In my suburban neighborhood a 6 minute drive to the nearest grocery store becomes a 50 minute walk along 3 lane highways.
> So take an example: let's say you want to go grocery shopping from your home in a walk-able urban center, it could be a 10 minute walk to get that done.
But it's not like that is the distinguishing factor between a suburb and a city center.
From my suburb house I can walk to one supermarket in 5 minutes and to another one in maybe 6-7 minutes. Yet it's definitely a suburb.
Obviously some people in my vicinity live right next to the store but the average distance is substantially larger for the majority of people in the area.
OK, now this makes me feel weird. I just realized that I must have no idea what a suburb is. I've only lived in Canadian cities, and I've spent extensive time living in Shenzhen and was stuck in Busan for almost a year due to COVID. I am now realizing that I must have never seen a suburb before because everything I imagined as a suburb must actually qualify as a city. What am I missing here, or is the US really just that abnormal in the world?
"Suburb" is usually the bit of America where every house is made from the same McMansion catalog, all roads are paved and there's not a shop, store or office in sight.
Everyone leaves at the same time like clockwork to go to work with their immense SUV, alone of course, driving through a congested interstate to the nearest city to their office. Then the spouse leaves on their SUV to take the kids to school, queueing to drop them off.
If someone sees anyone walking in the evening or at night, they call the cops and the walker is arrested first, then investigated later. The unlucky ones get shot.
I can't tell if this is satire or not, but it sounds absolutely horrific and I have no idea why anyone would want to live like that. I guess different people just have different tastes.
"Suburb" covers a lot of ground. There's the classical US cul-de-sac development of course. But people also use the term to encompass small cities and the periphery of larger cities that are mostly spread-out single family homes often generally lacking the ability to easily walk to stores, etc. Or largely exurban towns that may have a center but with homes often spread over a number of acres. (Which are still often considered urban by the US Census because they're basically within an hour or so of a larger city.)
wikipedia struggles a bit with the definition, but the pictures at the right show very clearly how large the range of what at least sometimes is called a "suburb" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb
But for discussions like this you probably can assume that people mean the less-dense, residential-only types
Yes, people think about characteristics like needing a car, mostly segregated (strip malls, industrial parks) commercial development, primarily single family homes, etc. but not truly rural (although that's a matter of degree). Whether or not it's actually a suburb of a city, an outlying town, or part of an outlying smaller city.
IMVHO (and personal experience) a certain level of density is needed, just because even if traveling is cheap it's not as cheap as such and we are social animals needing each others BUT more than a certain level of density issues surpass much the proximity needs.
Honestly my take is that we need Rivieras witch means a bit dense BUT not more than a bit suburbs that are NOT only residential but mixed. As a result we can have "near enough" services/people without failing in the density trap.
The big issue is that human settlements never worked well when centrally planned and when they are not if they work more people want to be there, so the initial low density became right and than too much dense. After that density issue start to bite, people to flee and the cycle restart. No recipe to fix it, it's more a social issue than a mere architectural one.
Some, like McKinsey think we can solve some complexity issue with flying vehicles and I agree, but I do not think we are as near as they state https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and we still have an enormous isse: making VTOLs/STOLs it's relatively easy (behind the BEV part) but they can just move people and little volume/weigh goods so we can't build a home moving raw materials without roads and if we need them we need to build and maintain them...
Keep following the "in medio stat virtus" principle about the density and diversity described above I think we also need to came back to a moderately distributed economy: some activities need big factories, so far we can't do anything different, BUT only some. Many others can be done in smaller settlements witch for instance that instead of build mega-factories for anything we should try to achieve economy of scale with standards and standard tools in many smaller factories. Easy to say, hard to built but... In the end internet was a free scale network of networks and prove to scale well enough. I think the same principle can be generally valid. The VERY COMPLEX and very expensive game is try it in the real word because social experiments can't be done and destroy as software projects. They demand very long time just to build them. Enormous resources etc and simulations can't really help more than a bit. Since in the past we have build many-centuries longs projects I think we can achieve such result anyway, but not in the modern mind settlement of something quick and done. Convincing people to embrace such revolution and remain engaged for few decades is however... Well... In the past we used religion to push people to such efforts...
Thanks; the "Why", or the interesting part of "Why", seems only alluded to, rather than explicitly discussed. Is it that the low density of suburban development means that tax collected per area unit, is less than infrastructure maintenance per area unit? And is the even more implied solution to increase urban density at least to the point where revenue per area matches expenses per area?
Basically, yes. The typical American suburb, even "dense" inner suburbs, often don't generate enough tax revenue to maintain infrastructure. The areas get built out with various subsidies from different levels of government; it's only 30 years down the road, when major infrastructure needs updated that the costs become apparent.
I'm not convinced your assertion is true in general. Picking some local towns, cities, and counties...
Shepherdstown WV, population of ~2000, population density 4,700/sq mi (bedroom community on outskirts of DC metro)
Fairfax County, VA, population of 1.1 million, density 2,800/sq mi (big, mixed suburban county)
Arlington County, VA, population 238,000, density 9,200/sq mi (much of it is very urban)
Charlottesville, VA (city) population 46,000, density 4,500/sq mi (small college city)
Anyways, the problem is sprawl, which can happen regardless of municipal label. Houston and LA sprawl and run into similar problems of upkeep as large counties like Fairfax Co VA.
- Long term liabilities are not tracked (e.g., muni worker pensions, pension guaranteed CoL adjustments) as hard liabilities. That makes it easy to budget things now and borrow invisibly from the future
- Heads I Win, Tails You Lose mentality given that federal government or others could possibly bail you out.
- Leadership worries about elections NOW and approval rating NOW, not about issues 20yrs into the future
- Some muni worker groups have a stranglehold over towns and can demand far more than economically feasible, or else
- Insufficient critical mass of citizenry to look at long term issues
It also means (and by "means" I mean "necessitates" or "requires") decay. Suburban development in metros that aren't otherwise growing guarantees decline elsewhere in the region. Sometimes people look at a place like North St. Louis in disbelief -- "how could all these houses have been abandoned?" -- without ever considering the fundamentals. The region has expanded to cover hundreds of square miles of new development since 1970 all with like 1% population growth. They doubled the number of houses, but they didn't double the number of households.
Decline is an illustration of the pigeonhole principle.
So it's not just that the new suburbs are too low-density to support themselves; they also create the conditions whereby the old parts of the city also de-densify to unsustainable levels.
It seems to me that the article would benefit from more data supporting the author's arguments. It's not clear what percentage of cities are affected by the problem or the average scale of the problem in those cities.
This pops up every couple of months or so. The numbers don't make sense and don't reflect reality. Infrastructure is ~10% of local government budget. Nobody is going bankrupt over that.
And AFAIK there's no city in existence where taxes & government expenditures are lower in the city compared to the suburbs. The expensive parts about government are mostly Schools & Criminal Justice. Both are significantly more expensive in cities on a per capita basis.
They make the argument that growth, in an of itself, is a "ponzi scheme". Whereas boom-bust economic cycles are nothing new, and are clearly not the same as a literal ponzi scheme.
I don't think there's any novel thinking here. They're just rebranding cyclic economics for dramatic effect.
The problem isn't growth the problem is that growth is required to pay for maintenance of the currently existing infrastructure. This is ponzi-scheme adjacent because if growth ever stops (and it has to), then everything collapses.
NotJustBikes are doing some incredible work. It’s really time to reframe how we plan our cities and make the spaces we occupy designed for human scale engagement.
I encourage anyone interested in this video to definitely check out more of their videos, so much valuable insight as to practically how our urban spaces could be incredible to live in.
Does the tone put anyone else off? I feel like I should be his perfect target audience (I cycle everywhere and prefer living in cities with good bike infrastructure) but I find the way he makes his arguments leaves me wanting to disagree with him.
Jason Slaughter, the author/creator, has said in numerous interviews that it is on purpose. He's tired of the BS from the pro-car, low-density folks, and leans into the snark.
Yes. I overall have similar views to him but I often find that his videos sound like they're preaching to the choir.
Aside from tone, he uses terms like "stroad" without explanation. Such terms will be known to people who watch a lot of similar content and likely already agree with him but not so much to people who don't, which are the people he that he needs to convince.
I also find things a bit one-sided. He might bring up problems with the way things are today and propose a solution to them but the solution always sounds like a silver bullet that magically solves all the problems. In reality there are always obstacles and downsides.
I grew up in the suburbs. By the time I was a teenager I couldn't help but ask: "Why is everything here new? And why are all the people white?" I took a look at "White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism" for some answers.
Can someone name an example of a city that has gone bankrupt due to infrastructure costs that didn't also lose a large amount of its population or lose key local industries?
This is made complicated because before cities go bankrupt they try to stay alive in ways that cause people and industry to leave (such as reducing school funding, reducing road maintenance, raising taxes, etc). As such, by the time the city goes bankrupt there will be other things to point to, but the underlying failure was that the city ran out of money and was trying to work around that.
And really what does bankruptcy mean for a city? It doesn't meet it's liabilities. It probably has some assets so those will be seized. That really doesn't extend to any property owned by others.
I think that’s a rather unfair question as cities should be resilient to significant population shifts. The world isn’t constant so the inability to handle change means you already have issues.
Population shifts don’t just happen in an afternoon if a city can’t deal with a 10% population decline over a decade it was already in dire straits. Pensions for example are’t inherently an issue, it’s just a debt that should have been prepaid over the ~30 years these employees where working for the city.
A great many US cities were losing population in the post-WWII era including some that are now regarded as "elite" coastal cities. Boston, for example, was losing population well into the nineties and, lots of universities notwithstanding, had no real major tech industry left by the time Teradyne moved out. (All the local computer companies and defense contractors were out in the suburbs/exurbs.)
So some cities did weather the cycles. Others like Detroit not so much--at least outside of certain core areas.
Wouldn't these be good examples? Boston is a pre-car city that weathered population decline well. Detroit was a city that rebuilt itself around the car and experienced decline.
The levels of decline were different however. As were a lot of other particulars.
Boston/Cambridge long had a major research university base as well as a fair bit of industry especially in East Cambridge and what's now the Seaport area. Also a significant financial/legal/etc. district. A lot of the industry did have significant declines maybe a couple of times in the 20th century. East Cambridge was really only revitalized in a major way when Pharma/biotech came in during the 80s/90s--and the Seaport redevelopment is ongoing.
There certainly have been efforts in Detroit and apparently the riverfront gentrification has progressed considerably but the city as a whole still is in generally poor shape and for a variety of reasons is probably less attractive overall than coastal cities are.
ADDED: And Boston may be a "pre-car city" and does have a decent public transit system but most adults still own cars because a lot of their friends and activities will be outside the city.
Detroit never rebuilt because intellectuals in places like Boston cooked up economic policies that pulled the rug out from under American manufacturing and heavy industry with predictable consequences for any city depending upon them.
In the U.S. population shifts in major cities happened rapidly after the desegregation. As an example of this the population of Pittsburgh was around 600,000 in 1960 and is around 300,000 today. The people that left tended to have higher paying jobs due to the wage gap between whites and blacks at the time. Local taxes declined significantly and since the U.S. largely funds k-12 education from local taxes the schools were badly affected. Once the spiral starts it’s hard to reverse.
Before desegregation ambulance, trash, and other city services used to be paid for using taxes. My unpopular view of all this is that whites largely decided that they didn’t want to pay for things that benefitted blacks and this very
much adversely affected large cities. I don’t know to what extent this plays into what the Strong Towns article talked about but it seems reasonable to think it plays a part.
It seems clear to me that a city that loses say half its population is not going to be able to just absorb that and move on. Like a large ant colony, a large number of ants are needed to support and maintain it.
Ant colonies are resiliant to large population drops. Colony size depends not just on species but also time of year and available food. As to cities, there isn’t a minimum viable size we just call tiny cities towns.
Trouble is poor don’t pay taxes but consume a lot of services. If the middle class and rich who do pay the bills leave them a city can have a huge decline in coke from a small population decline.
Over 50% of people pay $0 in income taxes. Yes, they pay sales taxes and generally property taxes indirectly as part of their rent - but they provide 0 in revenues as far as state, local, and Federal taxes are concerned.
The top 10% of income earners pay 80% of the taxes.
This is only true if you ignore payroll tax, social security, gas tax, tolls, and other highly regressive taxes. Where is your 10/80 stat coming from? https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2020/ paints a very different picture: the top 20% of earners pay 75% of income tax while making around 75% of the income.
The majority of people do not pay any income tax and also receive numerous credits. This means they are net gainers of the tax system by not only not paying anything but actually receiving bonus money for things that they aren't taxed on.
When you add up all those other things, it amounts to essentially nothing. At the end of the day while we have certain pols demanding high earners "pay their fair share", the truth is most people pay nothing and the highest earners pay for almost everything. These are just the facts. I suspect the "fair share" nonsense is just trying to leverage jealous tendencies in certain people that can't be bothered to address the root cause of their shortcomings: themselves.
First government services go disproportionately to support the wealthy. Just look at the density of cops : population in rich vs poor areas etc.
As to tax burden it only looks like that i you ignore the US has several different income taxes and many non income taxes. A homeless drunk who spends most of their money on cheap alcohol pays a higher percentage of tho income in taxes than any of the US billionaires.
Naming one specific income tax as “the income tax” was a brilliant idea that has been doping people for decades.
I can't, because every American city I can think of experienced redlining and white flight, which led to the loss of population, business, and investment.
Detroit? The industry is still there but they've lost 50% of their population.
But the whole point of the video is when you build these big suburbs and suburban development patterns you're on the hook for their cost no matter if anyone is living there or not.
Detroit's population has been declining for 60 years, and the population of the Metro area is still in the millions. The city itself is at 624,177 in '20. The downfall is years and the making and has to do with more than auto manufacturing. It's not like the nearby cities stuck with a single point of failure for a century, manufacturing is big but varied and the economy diversified over time. Across the U.S. manufacturing has been sensitive to the rise of competing economies.
strongtowns actually names Detroit as a very early adopter of suburban city planning and sprawl. The argument is they are in part reeling from the impact of these policies faster than other cities.
I live in a Suburban county that has seen pretty slow growth for decades and then exploded around 30 years ago. This county is very financially responsible and has done a fantastic job at keeping up with its expenses - before and after the explosion. There is no big city in the county (most of it is not even incorporated in a city), so the bills are paid by the county property taxes and some by the state government.
However, this county makes disproportionally high per capita state income tax contributions, to the tune of 2x/3x per capita compared to the nearby big city. As a matter of fact, myself and my county fellows heavily subsidize big city programs in the state: not only the big city's high traffic/maintenance crumbling roads, but schools, money losing public transportation, rent assistance, health programs, elderly assistance etc. What we spend in our arguably inefficient road network is a pittance compared to these.
Tearing out cement and putting down differently arranged cement is just wasteful. The Channel likes to dwell on how the Netherlands do all these things, but the creator fails to ever mention what pays for them there.
The truth of it all is that almost everything now is designed to subsidize something else, and it's a convoluted mess that enables people to steal and hide money, and to divert it to serve their interests.
If we properly addressed infrastructure spending on bike lanes and all of the things done to ensure bike safety through creating a bike registration tax and an insurance system, then a lot more could likely be done... Currently all of the new bike infrastructure going in to cities is subsidized by car taxes and things like speed cameras.
If extremely wealthy individuals paid their fair share in taxes, and if cities stopped subsidizing their huge sports stadiums and warehouses, then it possibly would be a lot easier to maintain and update infrastructure. We tolerate a revolving door of corruption and mis-use of funds in local and federal government, yet the middle class and poor are taxed at around half of their annual income every year once all the various taxes that can be levied are paid.
It's not about subsidizing poor low tax neighborhoods to me... The biggest offense is in the deceptive welfare system that is constantly subsidizing private companies and greedy individuals that really don't build growth and opportunity in communities for anyone but themselves...
Also we do have to admit that road and infrastructure work regularly is excessively overbilled to local governments...
The employees that do it are underpaid perhaps, but there is a long history in this country of infrastructure repair contracts being well overpriced in cost and time...
No better example than blowing up a perfectly good stadium to then overcharge for personal seat licenses while getting that tax base to pay for more of the new stadium than the total cost of the one blown up.
It is easy to complain about the issues surrounding suburbia. What I don't see much of is how to fix it. How do we fix the issues of suburbia without tearing it all down and starting over?
The US system means you can live outside cities (and so avoid paying city taxes) and travel in to enjoy the amenities they provide. The result is a classic "failure of the commons" where contributors move out and people in need move in.
The growth fallacy relies on cities already being short of cash, it is a symptom, not a disease.
To me most important is independent children. In Europe every kid I know walked to school, walked to go and buy groceries or other errands, walked to friends etc. But apparently that isn't really a thing in American suburbs, must be horrible for those kids to be so dependent on their parents until they can get a car themselves.
Yep, my kid walked to school from the first day of the first grade. Now as a fourth grader they just call me when school's out and tell me which friend's house they're going after school and walk there (or notify me if they're coming to our place). Sometimes they stop by the store on the way to get some snacks.
And when dinner is ready, we call them home and they walk back.
During the summer holidays they scoot or bike to the park close by to play with their friends.
An American Suburbia kid could never do any of this without someone calling the police or CPS for child endangerment even if there was a school, shop or a playground within walking distance.
> An American Suburbia kid could never do any of this without someone calling the police or CPS for child endangerment even if there was a school, shop or a playground within walking distance.
There's a lot of generalizations about suburbs in these discussions.
From my office window here in suburbia, about a block away from a middle school, every day I see hundreds of kids leave on foot. I imagine most go home in the nearby suburbs, although there are plenty of shops within easy walking distance so perhaps some of them stop at those. There's also a large park/playground not far from the school they might go to.
This idea of a suburb being a place that has nothing and you can't walk anywhere is weird to me. I'm sure such suburbs exist somehwere, but I've never seen one.
So school busses aren't a thing in USA? Where I live it is hard to find a home that is more than 5-10 minute walking distance to a school, nobody with kids would want to live further than that from schools. Even stand alone single family houses are within that distance of schools, since they are built close around denser suburban centers. If you live in an apartment you are almost always within 5 minutes walk of a school.
Of course there might be places where you live close to these amenities in USA, but you have to pay premium for them since it isn't the norm. In Europe that is the norm and you expect to get it basically no matter where you live, even in the dirt cheap areas. Only exception is if you choose to live in the woods or something far away from other people, I know some who does that but it is a choice. If you live in a small town with a few thousand people you will still be able to walk to buy groceries and to early school. Later school uses the same buss/train system as adults so kids gets to use that.
Not sure how this relates to my comment? In my suburb area most kids seem walk or bike to school based on the middle school I see from my office window. Hundreds leave walking, some dozens on bikes and only a few dozen cars lined up to pick up kids.
As to school buses, I don't know how it works. It's probably a school-by-school thing. I see some occasionally but not very often.
Driving feels dangerous. It feels like whenever I commute into the city, there's a motor accident of some kind.
It's not surprising since you're basically forcing million of people to control 2 tons vehicles. Inevitably, for one reason or another, someone's going to make a mistake.
Suburbs pay city taxes but are basically subsidized owing to the infrastructure cost relative to tax rate. You can hardly chalk the problem to too few people living within the city boundaries, but ultimately for super-long commuters what it would mean is the bulk of shouldering the cost of those people falls on the communities outside the city. People go in to work, that means the amenities used are a) the roads which have to be maintained anyway, and b) power in the city center which the corporate office pays for (and they pay property tax).
The infrastructure cost for inefficient sprawled out areas is enormous. A money pit.
Suburbs are not the only place that can’t fund their street maintenance. My city of Berkeley, California, only spends a fraction of what would be required and we have the worst pavement quality in the state. What’s needed is a frontage tax: $10/foot/year on each parcel ($400/year for typical parcel size and shape). That would fix the streets in perpetuity. It’s politically impossible though since people who live in single-family detached homes, who are massively subsidized by apartment dwellers, don’t want to lose that subsidy.
Ponzi Scheme: a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
Here, the Ponzi idea is that early investors in suburban and exurban housing receive generous subsidies to expensive infrastructure beyond what their value can realistically support tax-wise over the long term. Their early, illusory success (appreciation in price, perception of living The American Dream) convinces others to buy in before realizing that replacing sewers, roads, etc is really, really expensive at low density and so the infrastructure crumbles or requires a bail out.
It kinda does. Fractional reserve system means there is more debt that there is money. And if interest rates are not below zero. There will be always more debt until someone defaults. Actually even full reserve with debts would mean there is more debt than there is money...
I was thinking, for a city of 800k inhabitants, it's not that bad. But then I lived in Bordeaux which has 250k inhabitants and public transport was so amazing. I basically don't take public transport in SF anymore because I find it too dangerous, whereas I never once took a taxi or drove in Bordeaux (in 2 years there).
This sounds like a free activity or daycamp for kids[1]. I don't see what the big deal is. Gives kids a hobby and keeps them from getting into trouble. Probably a net savings long term when you consider the cost of dealing with youth crime.
By this name logic, public libraries and museums are also a waste of money.
Edit: It's also worth considering the scale of the problem vs the cost of a program like this. The article says that the state is billions in debt, meanwhile this costs .35 million - probably less than the average house in Illinois. A debt of billions seems more structural in nature than small, possibly unwise spends like this. This is the political equivalent of boomers telling young people that they could afford a house if only they cut back on avocado toast.
It's because the cities are unbelievably corrupt. Bloomberg was the only non-corrupt mayor because he could buy his way to victory and didn't have to rely on the established political machinery to get there. But he was just 1 person and with the kinds of revenues NYC was bringing in, there was just so many opportunities to scratch backs. Other pols are so indebted to so many people/organizations/etc that corruption is going to happen. They can't rise to power without getting all these favors which are to be repaid once they acquire power.
How do you get power? You get the support of the political machine in your area. How do you get that support? You get the organizations that fund that machine on your side. How do you get those organizations on your side? You promise to make their investment in you pay dividends when you come into power.
