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Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would sh

Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
>Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
  - ghaff 10y ago
    That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
    - nothrabannosir 10y ago
      This is a good point. In retrospect, I think you are right, and I didn't understand what op meant.
- Retric 10y ago
  There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres. Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks. IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.
  - bluGill 10y ago
    It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death. How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke. If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
- danans 10y ago
  Urban areas generate more tax revenue and receive less benefits per capita than suburban and rural areas. Here's an article about a study confirming this phenomenon in Indiana: http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subsidizes-rural-counties http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subs...
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I would note that's specifically Indiana tax distribution within the state and the outflow vs. inflow delta is relatively small (single digits). That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    Sure because a lot of those areas are poor. Surely, we're not talking about making it even harder to live in a rural area?
- the_gastropod 10y ago
  Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples: * Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner. * The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task. * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. * Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive. * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. (edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    > * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy. Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense. > * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes. > * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero. The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.
humanrebar 10y ago
> Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink. Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective. The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.
- akiselev 10y ago
  I'm not so sure that's true. A not insignificant portion of those people move back out to rural (not suburban) areas to raise families, escape urban burnout, or because of evolving personal tastes. When they do, they often bring significantly more wealth back than they "cost" growing up because of the opportunities they had in the city. It seems that the life and death of a small town depends far more on economic factors like competition from globalization, or environmental fluctuations (droughts, hurricanes, etc). In the US many, if not most, big cities would easily grow from immigration alone. Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.

Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago

>Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?

nothrabannosir 10y ago
Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
- ghaff 10y ago
  That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    This is a good point. In retrospect, I think you are right, and I didn't understand what op meant.
Retric 10y ago
There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres. Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks. IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.
- bluGill 10y ago
  It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death. How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke. If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
danans 10y ago
Urban areas generate more tax revenue and receive less benefits per capita than suburban and rural areas. Here's an article about a study confirming this phenomenon in Indiana: http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subsidizes-rural-counties http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subs...
- ghaff 10y ago
  I would note that's specifically Indiana tax distribution within the state and the outflow vs. inflow delta is relatively small (single digits). That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  Sure because a lot of those areas are poor. Surely, we're not talking about making it even harder to live in a rural area?
the_gastropod 10y ago
Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples: * Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner. * The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task. * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. * Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive. * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. (edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.
- Amezarak 10y ago
  > * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy. Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense. > * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes. > * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero. The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.

humanrebar 10y ago

> Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink. Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective. The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.

akiselev 10y ago
I'm not so sure that's true. A not insignificant portion of those people move back out to rural (not suburban) areas to raise families, escape urban burnout, or because of evolving personal tastes. When they do, they often bring significantly more wealth back than they "cost" growing up because of the opportunities they had in the city. It seems that the life and death of a small town depends far more on economic factors like competition from globalization, or environmental fluctuations (droughts, hurricanes, etc). In the US many, if not most, big cities would easily grow from immigration alone. Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.