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>Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity o

>Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. That's a hell of a claim, and no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us? Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You might keep wasting your time with composting, but almost nobody is going to let "sustainability" actually detract from their quality of life. The only reason why people in other countries don't make that same choice is that they're not really allowed to, because of development laws, high fuel taxes, and so forth.

ch4s3 9y ago
Another way to put it would be that roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't heavily subsidized in other places.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  Also, it costs more to build and maintain a house (compared to a flat), and most of the other countries, even the developed ones, aren't as affluent as the US.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    That's true, but you still find higher rates of urban living in similarly rich countries with lower subsidies on sprawl.
  - fuzzybeard 9y ago
    But after 15 years my house is paid off. With renting, you're paying for the rest of your life. After my mortgage I only pay taxes and upkeep which is a fraction as much.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      Sure, but you could buy something that isn't a detached, single family house. When I moved from my apartment I bought a house (no mortgage). When I add up extra utilities costs, taxes, insurance, and maintenance it comes up to about 75% of what I was paying for rent.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      If your house was converted to cash, and that cash invested at, say, 7%, that is what the "paid off" house is costing you.
    - taway_1212 9y ago
      It's not a matter of renting vs buying. In many other countries, just paying off the mortgage for a flat will take 15-30 years.
- deltawave 9y ago
  StrongTowns has a great article on this, "The Growth Ponzi Scheme," describing the effect that debt-fuelled, suburban city growth can have on municipal finances: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    I have in fact read that article :). It's quite a good overview.
  - turc1656 9y ago
    I strongly disagree with the core claim that the reason is "unproductive growth". That's not the reason. The reason is municipal debt and gross mismanagement of the townships at every level. The municipalities are taking on debt by the truckload because they have failed to 1) manage their resources and personnel properly and 2) tax accordingly to what they need to actually maintain all services, which is why they take on the debt. If they instead were unable to take on the debt they would be forced to either raise taxes, cut services, or some combination thereof. The past ~40 years have seen an ever decreasing interest rate environment, which allows municipalities to borrow money by issuing bonds, pay only the interest, then when the principal comes due, they roll it into a new bond that borrows even more. That new bond pays the old one off and then they have some more borrowed money to work with. And because interest rates have gone down more in the years since the previous bond issuance, they can pay the same interest. Basically, they just keep rolling debt over so that the principal is never paid down. Example - in 2000, bond rates were around 6%. In 2010 they were around 4%. In 2000, if a municipality took out $100M to build schools or whatever, they need to pay $6M a year in interest. Ten years later it comes due. Uh oh, they now need $106M this year but only budgeted for 6 of it. Our bureaucrats spend every penny of tax revenue over the last decade and never made allotments of $10M a year to pay back this loan. So what do they do? Thankfully the rate is 4%, so they can borrow a whopping $150M and still pay the same interest! So that's exactly what they do. Now they get to pay the same $6M every year and also have an additional $50M to spend on "growth" and "sustainability". This has happened across the board in nearly every municipality (city, suburb, etc.) across the nation. This is why the Fed hasn't raised rates. It's the same reason why Japan is in the situation they are in...for 30+ years.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't subsidized in my suburb. We pay for all of it.
  - ocb 9y ago
    If you live in the US that can't be true. The Interstate Highway System, state highways, etc. are government funded infrastructure that isn't funded locally. The mortgage market is also distorted/subsidized nationwide by the federal government. I'm not sure about sewers.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      You can only count the highway system as a subsidy if you pretend a highway between, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles is there to benefit the people of the Central Valley. And it's not. Certainly the mortgage market is distorted by the federal government, but I have yet to see any evidence of subsidy for suburban borrowers.
      - ufo 9y ago
        The home mortgage interest deduction is effectively a subsidy for suburban borrowers.
        gozur88 9y ago
        Why would you think that? Are people who buy million dollar shacks in SF forgoing their deduction? It's hard to imagine.
        ch4s3 9y ago
        It's a subsidy for all mortgages. More people would rent if not for this subsidy. Also any roady that connect your suburb to anywhere are heavily subsidized, to the tune of greater than 60%. If your suburb build its sewers with bonds, they too end up receiving various forms of subsidy. It would be truly unique in the whole of the US if your community's property taxes covered the full cost of local services and weren't partially covered from the state's general fund.
amyjess 9y ago
> It's pretty telling that no evidence whatsoever is provided for this claim. FWIW, I'm technically a Millennial (born in 1984, Millennials are born 1982-2004), and I'm a living counter-example to the article's claims. I love living in the suburbs, and I have no problems whatsoever with "visial monotony and social conformity". Really, I'd love to just be an anonymous cog in the machine. I want lots of space and no noise, and I'm visually in love with with the look and feel of sprawl. The only demand I make is that I strongly prefer living in southwestern and some midwestern suburbs that make use of an arterial grid (e.g. Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Columbus), and I despise the loosey-goosey layout of northeastern suburbs (I have family in NY... the suburbs there feel rural, and I just don't like that). Cities that use an arterial grid tend to place shopping centers at every intersection of arterials, and I like living close enough to one of those intersections that I can walk to the supermarket if I need to. That is the only kind of "walkability" I care about. Interestingly enough, a recent local tragedy actually brought to light just how much of my age group in my area prefers suburban living. Last weekend, there was a mass shooting at a football watch party in a suburban home in Plano, TX. The shooter and the victims were all fairly close in age to me, leaning younger (the shooter was my age exactly, one other victim was a year older than me, four were 1-5 years younger than me, and three were 7-10 years younger than me). All of them are Millennial suburbanites living in a pretty conservative, sprawling suburb. Furthermore, as I found out after the shooting I have multiple friends who live in that neighborhood, all of whom are within two years of my age. Whatever this alleged trend in suburbs is, it didn't seem to affect Millennials who attended UTD in the mid-to-late '00s. (As an aside, this has been pretty devastating--the suburbs of Dallas are tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other, I have mutual friends with almost every single person involved, we all went to the same university, and I'd met one of the victims before. Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is to help me process what happened. And my friends who live there are seriously freaked because their neighbors just got murdered and there are cops and tourists all over their neighborhood now.)
cowsandmilk 9y ago
> no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us? It is important to note this is in the opinion section. This is written by a professor at MIT, not anyone on the NYTimes staff. ( https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger ) > Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You provide no evidence for this, and the evidence is strong against you. Nearly everyone who wants to show "suburb preference" tries to show that "hey, when people turn 30-35, they still tend to move to the suburbs", which is no surprise. And the opinion article in the NYTimes even does this. That is "lifecycle change" and obviously will occur. But the question is whether there has been generational change. Are a higher percentage of 35 year olds living in the city than there were 15 years ago? Are a higher percentage of families choosing to live in cities than 15 years ago? The answers to these questions is yes, indicating a generational change towards the city. You see new groups popping up pushing for better facilities for strollers. They have become common enough on public transit that Boston tried to ban them. That's an indication that people are no longer fleeing to the suburbs once they have kids. I don't have a convenient graph for city vs. suburbs, but I do have one for the somewhat related homeownership[0]. What the graph shows is that yes, there is a lifecycle where more people own homes as they get older, but there is also a generational change where 2014's 42 year old is less likely to own a home than 2001's 42 year old. And the same for pretty much every age from 20-65. [0] https://goo.gl/wp1eQu https://goo.gl/wp1eQu
CalRobert 9y ago
"Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us." Speak for yourself. I could also say the only reason people in the US don't choose to live in the city is because they're not really allowed to, what with it being basically illegal to build nice cities any more (parking minimums, zoning, etc.) Also, if nobody wants to live in the city it's hard to explain why they're so expensive. Somebody's paying those prices, after all.

ch4s3 9y ago

Another way to put it would be that roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't heavily subsidized in other places.

taway_1212 9y ago
Also, it costs more to build and maintain a house (compared to a flat), and most of the other countries, even the developed ones, aren't as affluent as the US.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  That's true, but you still find higher rates of urban living in similarly rich countries with lower subsidies on sprawl.
- fuzzybeard 9y ago
  But after 15 years my house is paid off. With renting, you're paying for the rest of your life. After my mortgage I only pay taxes and upkeep which is a fraction as much.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Sure, but you could buy something that isn't a detached, single family house. When I moved from my apartment I bought a house (no mortgage). When I add up extra utilities costs, taxes, insurance, and maintenance it comes up to about 75% of what I was paying for rent.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    If your house was converted to cash, and that cash invested at, say, 7%, that is what the "paid off" house is costing you.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    It's not a matter of renting vs buying. In many other countries, just paying off the mortgage for a flat will take 15-30 years.
deltawave 9y ago
StrongTowns has a great article on this, "The Growth Ponzi Scheme," describing the effect that debt-fuelled, suburban city growth can have on municipal finances: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I have in fact read that article :). It's quite a good overview.
- turc1656 9y ago
  I strongly disagree with the core claim that the reason is "unproductive growth". That's not the reason. The reason is municipal debt and gross mismanagement of the townships at every level. The municipalities are taking on debt by the truckload because they have failed to 1) manage their resources and personnel properly and 2) tax accordingly to what they need to actually maintain all services, which is why they take on the debt. If they instead were unable to take on the debt they would be forced to either raise taxes, cut services, or some combination thereof. The past ~40 years have seen an ever decreasing interest rate environment, which allows municipalities to borrow money by issuing bonds, pay only the interest, then when the principal comes due, they roll it into a new bond that borrows even more. That new bond pays the old one off and then they have some more borrowed money to work with. And because interest rates have gone down more in the years since the previous bond issuance, they can pay the same interest. Basically, they just keep rolling debt over so that the principal is never paid down. Example - in 2000, bond rates were around 6%. In 2010 they were around 4%. In 2000, if a municipality took out $100M to build schools or whatever, they need to pay $6M a year in interest. Ten years later it comes due. Uh oh, they now need $106M this year but only budgeted for 6 of it. Our bureaucrats spend every penny of tax revenue over the last decade and never made allotments of $10M a year to pay back this loan. So what do they do? Thankfully the rate is 4%, so they can borrow a whopping $150M and still pay the same interest! So that's exactly what they do. Now they get to pay the same $6M every year and also have an additional $50M to spend on "growth" and "sustainability". This has happened across the board in nearly every municipality (city, suburb, etc.) across the nation. This is why the Fed hasn't raised rates. It's the same reason why Japan is in the situation they are in...for 30+ years.
gozur88 9y ago
Roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't subsidized in my suburb. We pay for all of it.
- ocb 9y ago
  If you live in the US that can't be true. The Interstate Highway System, state highways, etc. are government funded infrastructure that isn't funded locally. The mortgage market is also distorted/subsidized nationwide by the federal government. I'm not sure about sewers.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    You can only count the highway system as a subsidy if you pretend a highway between, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles is there to benefit the people of the Central Valley. And it's not. Certainly the mortgage market is distorted by the federal government, but I have yet to see any evidence of subsidy for suburban borrowers.
    - ufo 9y ago
      The home mortgage interest deduction is effectively a subsidy for suburban borrowers.
      - gozur88 9y ago
        Why would you think that? Are people who buy million dollar shacks in SF forgoing their deduction? It's hard to imagine.
        ch4s3 9y ago
        It's a subsidy for all mortgages. More people would rent if not for this subsidy. Also any roady that connect your suburb to anywhere are heavily subsidized, to the tune of greater than 60%. If your suburb build its sewers with bonds, they too end up receiving various forms of subsidy. It would be truly unique in the whole of the US if your community's property taxes covered the full cost of local services and weren't partially covered from the state's general fund.

amyjess 9y ago

> It's pretty telling that no evidence whatsoever is provided for this claim. FWIW, I'm technically a Millennial (born in 1984, Millennials are born 1982-2004), and I'm a living counter-example to the article's claims. I love living in the suburbs, and I have no problems whatsoever with "visial monotony and social conformity". Really, I'd love to just be an anonymous cog in the machine. I want lots of space and no noise, and I'm visually in love with with the look and feel of sprawl. The only demand I make is that I strongly prefer living in southwestern and some midwestern suburbs that make use of an arterial grid (e.g. Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Columbus), and I despise the loosey-goosey layout of northeastern suburbs (I have family in NY... the suburbs there feel rural, and I just don't like that). Cities that use an arterial grid tend to place shopping centers at every intersection of arterials, and I like living close enough to one of those intersections that I can walk to the supermarket if I need to. That is the only kind of "walkability" I care about. Interestingly enough, a recent local tragedy actually brought to light just how much of my age group in my area prefers suburban living. Last weekend, there was a mass shooting at a football watch party in a suburban home in Plano, TX. The shooter and the victims were all fairly close in age to me, leaning younger (the shooter was my age exactly, one other victim was a year older than me, four were 1-5 years younger than me, and three were 7-10 years younger than me). All of them are Millennial suburbanites living in a pretty conservative, sprawling suburb. Furthermore, as I found out after the shooting I have multiple friends who live in that neighborhood, all of whom are within two years of my age. Whatever this alleged trend in suburbs is, it didn't seem to affect Millennials who attended UTD in the mid-to-late '00s. (As an aside, this has been pretty devastating--the suburbs of Dallas are tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other, I have mutual friends with almost every single person involved, we all went to the same university, and I'd met one of the victims before. Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is to help me process what happened. And my friends who live there are seriously freaked because their neighbors just got murdered and there are cops and tourists all over their neighborhood now.)

cowsandmilk 9y ago

> no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us? It is important to note this is in the opinion section. This is written by a professor at MIT, not anyone on the NYTimes staff. ( https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger ) > Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You provide no evidence for this, and the evidence is strong against you. Nearly everyone who wants to show "suburb preference" tries to show that "hey, when people turn 30-35, they still tend to move to the suburbs", which is no surprise. And the opinion article in the NYTimes even does this. That is "lifecycle change" and obviously will occur. But the question is whether there has been generational change. Are a higher percentage of 35 year olds living in the city than there were 15 years ago? Are a higher percentage of families choosing to live in cities than 15 years ago? The answers to these questions is yes, indicating a generational change towards the city. You see new groups popping up pushing for better facilities for strollers. They have become common enough on public transit that Boston tried to ban them. That's an indication that people are no longer fleeing to the suburbs once they have kids. I don't have a convenient graph for city vs. suburbs, but I do have one for the somewhat related homeownership[0]. What the graph shows is that yes, there is a lifecycle where more people own homes as they get older, but there is also a generational change where 2014's 42 year old is less likely to own a home than 2001's 42 year old. And the same for pretty much every age from 20-65. [0] https://goo.gl/wp1eQu https://goo.gl/wp1eQu

CalRobert 9y ago

"Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us." Speak for yourself. I could also say the only reason people in the US don't choose to live in the city is because they're not really allowed to, what with it being basically illegal to build nice cities any more (parking minimums, zoning, etc.) Also, if nobody wants to live in the city it's hard to explain why they're so expensive. Somebody's paying those prices, after all.