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As I ponder the suburban/urban/rural matter, I come to a pretty blunt conclusion - in order to have a functioning society over the next 150 years, we need to ef
by pnathan 10y ago
As I ponder the suburban/urban/rural matter, I come to a pretty blunt conclusion - in order to have a functioning society over the next 150 years, we need to effectively outlaw exurbs and suburbs or make them prohibitively expensive.
We need to prioritize solving climate change; prioritize effective resource distribution; prioritize central management at the provincial/federal level; prioritize integrations of humanity into high-density regions. This will boost effectiveness of the tax dollar per square mile, as well as collocating more tax dollars in census zones, so having more dollars per mile. Vast amounts of functionally unsustainable infrastructure - from roads, to schools, to governmental structures have been built that is not fundable at the level we are asking it to perform at.
This needs to change at the federal level, and aggressively.
Fundamentally there are repeated precedents in US history for this kind of centralized planning: the two big waves previously are homesteading and suburban funding via Fannie/Freddie and post-WW2 home loans. The US needs to do it again.
Having lived in the suburb and rural worlds, I understand their viewpoint - and it is valid, but doesn't have the mathmatics to sustain it - but my perspective is that a profound slow-moving crisis is upon us; the only real solution is to start shutting down the suburbs and urbanize as hard as possible.
We're not in the 1890s or the 1950s anymore; our housing policy needs to address the functioning reality of 2016 and the challenges we face today.
- stonogo 10y agoI would literally rather die than move back into an urban environment. What are your plans for people who cannot be incentivized to agree with you?
- kylec 10y agoYou're making some strong claims here, care to back them up? I'm not convinced that suburban/rural life is unsustainable just because you say it is.
- pnathan 10y agoYes, it's a strong claim. To be honest, I don't have a list of citations. But I have spent a lot of time reading the New Urbanism materials. I have spent a fair amount of time taking in the comments of the Green movement. I also have spent a good deal of my life in the rural/suburban state of Idaho. So collecting that experience, I will say: it's not sustainable. It's so not sustainable that it's abusing the environment; so not sustainable that small cities are struggling; it is so not sustainable that low-density economies are collapsing e'er so slowly but visibly in real time. The social costs of isolation and low density living are taking a toll - the empty suburban life is cliche; the rural world is becoming linked with meth addiction to stave off the issues. It's not just market forces; it's market forces plus governmental help (there's no "free market" in the US when it comes to housing), and tremendous environmental issues. If you really want, I can spend a few hours collating references and send you an annotated bibliography. It won't be complete, and it certainly won't be able to capture my experiences living out of the city.
- kylec 10y agoI'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you want to convince other people of your opinion I suggest writing up your argument into a well-cited article. Personally, I'm skeptical, but I'm willing to consider what you have to say. Specifically, you have twice mentioned the environmental impact of low vs high density living and I'm curious to know more about that.
- pnathan 10y agoUnderstood. I'm going to try to scrape this together as an actual article/essay and put it on my fine website. It'll be a week or two in coming, I think(a software engineer just made an estimate, insert lols as appropriate). I'll email you when I'm done.
- niftich 10y agoI don't believe the free market is the solution to everything, but in this case the market already solve this. As suburbs age and become crowded people move further out, or back into the urban core. If a particular local government jurisdiction doesn't have enough revenue to maintain or expand roads, schools, water and sewer service, it will try to annex more land, or change its zoning and offer incentives stimulate higher-revenue uses than residential. If the concern is about agricultural or forest land being taken for development, perhaps our economic system doesn't sufficiently reward those land uses (yet).
- TulliusCicero 10y agoYou're right that the suburban unsustainability will eventually solve the issue, but it'll cause a lot of misery in the meantime. Better to have avoided the problem in the first place.
- rconti 10y agoAh, nothing creates effective resource distribution and use of tax dollars per square mile like good 'ol central management.
- st3v3r 10y agoLeaving it purely up to the market doesn't create an effective resource distribution either. It creates a profitable resource distribution for those in charge of the capital. Sometimes that might correspond with an effective resource distribution for society, but many times doesn't.